Master of the Crossroads (3 page)

When he had crossed the backbone of this range, he began to see regular rows of coffee trees, the bean pods reddening for harvest. And not much farther on were many women gathered by the trail’s side, with goods arrayed for a sort of market: ripe mangoes and bananas and soursops and green oranges and grapefruit. A woman held a stack of folded flat cassava bread, and another was roasting ears of corn over a small brazier. Also a few men were there, and some in soldiers’ uniforms of the Spanish army, though all of them were black.

The man crouched over his heels and waited, the knife on the ground near his right hand. The soldiers made their trades and left—it was only they who seemed to deal in money. Among the others all was barter, but the man had nothing to exchange except his knife and that he would not give up. Still a woman came and gave him a ripe banana whose brownflecked skin was plump to bursting, and another gave him a cassava bread without asking anything in return. Squatting over his heels, he ate the whole banana and perhaps a quarter of the bread, eating slowly so that his stomach might not cramp. When he had rested he stood up and followed the way the soldiers had taken, carrying his knife in one hand and the remains of the bread in the other.

The opening of the trail the soldiers used was hidden by an overhang of leaves, but past this it widened and showed signs of constant use. The man crossed over a ridge of the mountain and looked down on terraces planted with more coffee trees. In the valley below was a sizable plantation with
carrés
of sugarcane and the
grand’case
standing at the center as it would have done in the days of slavery not long since, but all round the big house and the cane fields was encamped an army of black soldiers.

He was not halfway down the hill before he tumbled over sentries posted there. They trained their guns on him at once and took away his knife and the remainder of his bread. They asked his business but did not give him time to answer. They made him put his hands up on his head and chivied him down the terraces of coffee, prodding him with the points of their bayonets.

In the midst of the encampment some of the black soldiers glanced up to notice his arrival, but most went on about their business as if unaware. The sentries urged him into the yard below the gallery of the
grand’case.
A white man in the uniform of a Spanish officer was passing and the sentries hailed him and saluted. The white man stopped and asked the other why he had come there. Despite the uniform his face was not of the Spanish cast and his accent was that of a Frenchman.

Where is Toussaint? the man said. Toussaint Louverture.

The white officer stared a moment and then turned and sharply saluted a black man, also in Spanish uniform, who was then approaching. The black officer turned and asked the man the same question once more and the man drew himself up and began to recite:

Brothers and friends, I am Toussaint Louverture. My name is perhaps
not unknown to you—

The black officer cut him off with a slashing movement of his hand and the man stared back at him, wondering if this could be the person he had sought (as the white officer had seemed to respect him so). But then a silence fell over the camp, like the quiet when birdsong ceases. A large white stallion walked into the yard and a black man in general’s uniform pulled the horse up and dismounted. His face was no higher than the horse’s shoulder when he stood on the ground, and his uniform was thoroughly coated with dust from wherever he’d been traveling.

The two junior officers saluted again and the black one drew near and spoke softly into the ear of the general. The general nodded and beckoned to the man who had walked into the camp from the mountains, and then the general turned and started toward the
grand’case.
His legs were short and a little bowed, perhaps from constant riding. As he began to mount the
grand’case
steps, he reached across his hip and hitched up the hilt of his long sword so that the scabbard would not knock against the steps as he was climbing. A sentry nudged the man with a bayonet and he moved forward and went after the black general.

On the open gallery the black general took a seat in a fan-backed rattan armchair and motioned the man to a stool nearby. When the man had sat down, the general said for him to say again those words he had begun before. The man swallowed once and began it.

Brothers and friends, I am Toussaint Louverture. My name is perhaps
not unknown to you. I have undertaken to avenge you. I want liberty and
equality to reign throughout Saint Domingue. I am working toward that
end. Come and join me, brothers, and fight by our side for the same cause.

The general took off his high-plumed hat and placed it on the floor. Beneath it he wore a yellow madras cloth over his head, tied in the back above his short gray pigtail. The cloth was a little sweat-stained at his brows. His lower jaw was long and underslung, with crooked teeth, his forehead was high and smooth, and his eyes calm and attentive.

So, he told the man, so you can read.

No, the man replied. It was read to me.

You learned it, then.

Nan kè moin.
By heart. He placed his hand above the organ he had named.

Toussaint covered his mouth with his hand, as if he hid a smile, a laugh. After a moment he took the hand away.

It was yourself who made those words, the man said, hint of a question in his voice. Those are the words you made at Camp Turel.

It is so, Toussaint told him, solemnly, with no smile this time, nor any gesture of concealment.

That is good, the man said, lowering his eyes.

Tell me your name, Toussaint said, and your own story.

The white men called me Tarquin, but the slaves called me Guiaou.

Guiaou, then. Why did you come here?

To fight for freedom. With black soldiers. And for vengeance. I came to fight.

You have fought before?

Yes, Guiaou said. In the west. At Croix des Bouquets and in other places.

Tell me, Toussaint said.

Guiaou told that when news came of the slave rising on the northern plain, he had run away from his plantation in the Western Department of the colony and gone looking for a way to join in the fighting. Other slaves were leaving their plantations in that country, but not so many yet at that time. Then
les gens de couleur
were all gathering at Croix des Bouquets to make an army against the white men. And the
grand blancs
came and made a compact with
les gens de couleur
because they were at war with the
petit blancs
at Port au Prince.

Hanus de Jumécourt, Toussaint said.

Yes, said Guiaou. It was that
grand blanc.

There were three hundred of us then, Guiaou told, three hundred slaves escaped from surrounding plantations that
les gens de couleur
made into a separate division of their army at Croix des Bouquets. They called them the Swiss, Guiaou said.

The Swiss? Toussaint hid his mouth behind his hand.

It was from the King in France, Guiaou said. They told us, that was the name of the King’s own guard.

And your leader? Toussaint said.

A mulatto. Antoine Rigaud.

Toussaint called over his shoulder into the house and a short, bald white man with a pointed beard came out, carrying a pen and some paper. The white man sat down in a chair beside them.

Tell me, Toussaint said.

Of Rigaud?

All that you know of him.

A mulatto, Guiaou told, Rigaud was the son of a white planter and a pure black woman of Guinée. He was a handsome man of middle height, and proud with the pride of a white man. He always wore a wig of smooth white man’s hair, because his own hair was crinkly, from his mother’s blood. It was said that he had been in France, where he had joined the French army; it was said that he had fought in the American Revolutionary War, among the French. Rigaud was fond of pleasure and he had the short and sudden temper of a white man, but he was good at planning fights and often won them.

The balding white man scratched across the paper with his pen, while Toussaint stroked his fingers down the length of his jaw and watched Guiaou.

And the fighting? Toussaint said.

There was one fight, Guiaou told him. The
petit blancs
attacked us at Croix des Bouquets, and fighting with
les gens de couleur
and the
grand
blancs,
we whipped them there. After this fight the two kinds of white men made a peace with each other and with
les gens de couleur
and they signed the peace on a paper they wrote. Also there were prayers to white men’s gods.

And the black people, Toussaint said. The Swiss?

They would not send the Swiss back to their plantations, Guiaou told. The
grand blancs
and mulattoes feared the Swiss had learned too much of fighting, that they would make a rising among the other slaves. It was told that the Swiss would be taken out of the country and sent to live in Mexico or Honduras or some other place they had never known. After one day’s sailing they were put off onto an empty beach, but when men came there they were English white men.

This was Jamaica, where the Swiss were left. The English of Jamaica were unhappy to see them there, so the Swiss were taken to a prison. Then they were loaded onto another ship to be returned to Saint Domingue. On this second ship they were put in chains and closed up in the hold like slaves again. When the ship reached the French harbor they were not taken off.

Guiaou told how his chains were not well set. During the night he worked free of them, tearing his heels and palms, and then lay quietly, letting no one know that he had freed himself. In the night white men came down through the hatches and began killing the chained men in the hold with knives.

Guiaou covered his neck with his right hand to show how the old scars mated there. After several blows, he told, he had twisted the knife from the hand of the white man who was cutting him and stabbed him once in the belly and then he had run for the ladders, feet slipping in blood that covered the floor of the hold like the floor of a slaughterhouse. But when he came on deck the white men began shooting at him so he could only go over the side—

Guiaou stopped speaking. His Adam’s apple pumped and he began to sweat.

It’s enough, Toussaint said, looking at the tangled scars around Guiaou’s rib cage. I understand you.

Guiaou swallowed then, and went on speaking. In the dark water, he said then, the dead or half-dead men were all sinking in their chains, and sharks fed on them while they sank. The sharks attacked Guiaou as well but he still had the cane knife he had snatched, and though badly mauled he fended off the sharks and clambered out of that whirlpool of fins and blood and teeth, onto one of the little boats the killers had used to come to the ship. He cut the mooring and let the boat go drifting, lying on the floor of the boat and feeling his blood run out to mix with the pools of brine in the bilges. When the boat drifted to shore, he climbed into the jungle and hid there until his wounds were healed.

How long since then? Toussaint said.

I didn’t count the time, said Guiaou. I was walking all up and down the country until I came to you.

Toussaint looked at the bearded white man, who had some time since stopped writing, and then he called down into the yard. A barefoot black soldier came trotting up the steps onto the gallery.

Take care of him. Toussaint looked at Guiaou.

Coutelas moin,
Guiaou said.

And give him back his knife. Toussaint hid his mouth behind his hand.

Guiaou followed the black soldier to a tent on the edge of the cane fields. Here he was given a pair of worn military trousers mended with a waxy thread, and a cartridge box and belt. Another black soldier came and gave him back the cane knife and also returned him his piece of cassava, which had not been touched.

Guiaou put on the trousers and rolled the cuffs above his ankles. He put on the belt and box and thrust the blade of his cane knife through the belt to sling it there. The first black soldier handed him a musket from the tent. The gun was old but had been well cared for. There was no trace of rust on the bayonet or the barrel. Guiaou touched the bayonet’s edge and point with his thumb. He raised the musket to his shoulder and looked along the barrel and then lowered it and checked the firing pan. He pulled back the hammer to see the spring was tight and lowered it gently with his thumb so that it made no sound.

The other two black soldiers were almost expressionless, yet they seemed to have relaxed a little, seeing Guiaou so familiar with his weapon. Guiaou lowered the musket butt to the ground and looped his fingers loosely around the barrel. He stood not precisely at attention, but in a state of readiness.

2

The black soldiers were mostly camped in the woods on the rocky slopes above the compound of the
grand’case
and the cane mill, above the flat
carrés
of cane and the ascending terraces of coffee trees. Some of the men were housed in tents but these, someone had told Guiaou, were officers. He was free to make his own
ajoupa,
as the other men had done, and thus he spent part of the afternoon plaiting together long strips of
herbe à panache,
to make a roof he could erect on sticks against a face of rock. All around the place that he had chosen were other such shelters receding in all directions through the trees across and up the mountainside, much farther than he could see. There were more black soldiers here than he could count, many, many hundreds of them.

When he had completed the
ajoupa,
Guiaou sat down in the shade of the plaited roof. He placed his bread and cutlass and the cartridge box on a banana leaf beside him, and held the musket he’d been given across his knees. The air was so very still and hot that even the small movements of weaving his roof had put a gloss of sweat on his bare upper body. He sat motionless, cooling. The view of the fields and the buildings below was clear. After a passage of time Guiaou spoke to his neighbor, one of the soldiers who had outfitted him, whose name was Quamba.

“They are still working the cane in this place,” Guiaou said.

“Yes,” said the other. “They are working the cane.”

“But they are not slaves who work the cane.”

“Not slaves,” Quamba said. “Soldiers. In return the
habitant
gives land for growing yams and corn. He gives his sheep and goats and pigs.”

“It’s that,” Guiaou said.

“Yes, it’s that,” Quamba said, who sat beneath a roof improvised in the same manner as Guiaou’s and backed into the same shelf of rock. He was looking in the same direction too, down into the compound; neither man had looked directly at the other when they spoke. The general Toussaint Louverture came down from the gallery, hitching up his scabbard to clear the steps and swinging on his plumed hat. He crossed the yard briskly and went into the cane mill.

“Sé bon blanc, habitant-la,”
Quamba said after a moment. A good white man.

They did not say anything more. The air was growing heavier moment to moment, thick and damp, and everything was darkening, as though the whole of the mountain valley had been plunged underwater. With the subaqueous shading of the light a cold spot appeared in Guiaou’s belly and began spreading toward his hands and feet, although his skin was still slick from the heat and his small efforts earlier. His damp palms tightened on the grips of the musket. Below, a white woman with straw-colored hair came hurrying across the compound, leading a little white girl by the hand; with her was a beautiful mulattress who carried a smaller child in her arms. The two women hastened into the
grand’case,
leaving nothing in the yard but a red and gold cock which zizagged aimlessly in different directions, scratching up dust and clucking, then finally darted under the steps to the
grand’case
gallery.

The rain came down all at once as if it had been dumped from a basin on high. No thunder and no turbulence, only a wall of water which closed off Guiaou’s view; he could not see the compound of the
grand’-case
anymore, nor any of the neighboring
ajoupas.
His own roof held up well enough, with a little water beading around the tight plaits of his weaving. As he’d hoped, the run-off downhill from the rain channeled itself around the rock at his back, so that the area where he was sitting remained quite dry. There was room enough that he might have lain down, even, but he remained sitting with his back against the cool stone. His fingers loosened on the musket, his eyes closed, and he seemed to sleep, although the slightest shift in the pulse of the rain would have been sufficient to arouse him.

Doctor Antoine Hébert lay listening to the rain rush over the roof of the
grand’case.
In the next room, the main public room of the house though it could hardly be called a salon, he could hear the whispering and bustling of the women: his mistress, the
femme de couleur
Nanon, and his sister Elise had just come in with the children. The doctor had been listening for their return for half an hour, and he was relieved that they had beaten the rain to shelter, especially for the sake of the children, for a soaking in this climate might lead to serious illness.

Now he could relax more fully, and he was bonelessly fatigued, for he had been working very hard through the earlier part of the day, furthering a project he had conceived to divert the course of a mountain spring, both for irrigation and for pleasures he had imagined. He had put his own hands to this work not only for the shortage of
main d’oeuvre
but because it was easier for him so. He had not been in Saint Domingue long enough to accustom himself to slavery (which was now officially at an end in the colony, at least in those areas still controlled by the Republican French) and so he found it simpler to demonstrate his intentions rather than merely ordering that they be accomplished. He had worked most of the day with little respite before the approach of the rain and then had returned to the
grand’case,
where he’d washed himself and undressed to his shirt before stretching out on the bed.

The murmuring of the women faded in the other room and Doctor Hébert lay quietly, listening to the rain. Presently he heard Nanon come in and opened one eye to see her silhouette briefly framed in the doorway to the gallery. The rush of the rain water sounded louder for a moment until she closed the door.

“You’re sleeping?” Nanon said in a low voice.

The doctor did not answer her. Because of the rain and the closed jalousies there was not light enough in the room for them to see one another very plainly at all. He closed his eyes as she approached the bed, and soon he felt one of her hands, cool and slim-fingered, smoothing over his brow and the sunburned baldness of his head. She paused, then with her other hand turned up his shirt tails and found him there.

“Voilà que ce monsieur reste en réveil, au moins,”
she said in a sly whisper. Both her hands withdrew as she straightened from the bed. The doctor could not see her face, only the shadows of her arms unloosing the long scarf that bound her hair. The moist rain-swollen air was cool on the bare exposed fork of him. Her dress dropped in a whispering pool around her feet. When she came to the bed, he raised up onto his elbows and caught the corner of her mouth with a dry kiss.

“And Paul?” he said.

“Zabeth has taken him,” Nanon whispered. The warm weight of her breasts pressed into his shirt front, and he dropped backward onto the sheets.

In the small brick-walled office of the cane mill, Toussaint Louverture sat reading drafts of letters by the light of an oil lamp. The rain made a steady roaring sound on the roof, and he had left the outside door open so that he could, at times, glance over and see the rain beyond the sill and eaves, a flowing wall of water. The letters were, in principle, his own, and all addressed to the same person, General Etienne Laveaux, who commanded the Republican French army in the Northern Department. Indeed there was only one letter, in principle, but Toussaint had not yet selected its final version. He had ordered different drafts from several of his sometime secretaries: Doctor Hébert, a mulatto youth who was called Moustique and who was the son of a renegade French priest, and Captain Maillart, a Frenchman who was now one of Toussaint’s officers but had formerly served under Laveaux and so had the advantage of knowing him personally.

Toussaint arranged and rearranged the three sheets of paper in the soft-edged, yellow circle of lamplight, smoothing them with his large hands. None was yet perfect, no version complete. Another Frenchman had turned up in camp that day, claiming to have recently deserted from Laveaux. Toussaint did not much believe his story, for the Frenchman, who called himself Bruno Pinchon, had more the air of a soldier of fortune than that of a regular army officer. Nevertheless, he now thought of exploring the newcomer’s epistolary style, on the following day, if not later that evening. He had sent Pinchon to dine with the white people who stayed in the
grand’case.

Now he folded the letters away and turned his chair slightly to face the door and the rain flooding down beyond it. His eyes half-closed, he pictured places and the people in them as if on charts—as he commissioned letter-writing, so he commissioned the drawing of maps, and one way or another these maps were always drawing themselves before his eyes.

Here was Habitation Thibodet, in the canton of Ennery, and not far from the coast town of Gonaives; here his army was established, the men he had been gathering and training since the first insurrection broke out on the northern plain in 1791. The army of Toussaint Louverture was now almost four thousand strong. Gonaives itself was under Toussaint’s control, and he maintained a
quartier général
there, with a light garrison, but for the moment he preferred to keep the main body of his force withdrawn at Ennery, under cover of mountains and jungle instead of exposed on the coast. The English occupied Saint Marc, the next important town south on the coastline. The English had invaded from Jamaica and joined forces with the
grand blanc
royalist French and the slave- and property-holding mulattoes—they had restored slavery in whatever territories they could win for the English crown. In the Southern Department the English had made significant gains, Toussaint had heard. In the Western Department, they had most likely taken Port-au-Prince as well as Saint Marc. But news came uncertainly from those areas, which were divided from Toussaint’s position by considerable distances ornamented with near-impassable mountains.

To the north lay Cap Français, the Jewel of the Antilles; this port was technically at least under French Republican control, though presently under command of a mulatto officer, Villatte. Toussaint knew that area well, having spent a good period of his life at Habitation Bréda, in the area of Haut du Cap. West of Le Cap, along the northern coast, Laveaux was hemmed in at Port-de-Paix—it was from here that Bruno Pinchon claimed to have defected. At the tip of the northwest peninsula, the English were found again, occupying the naval station of Môle Saint Nicolas.

In between these areas, which Toussaint could flag on his mental maps, all was confusion and uncertainty. He did not know the present position of the French Commissioner Sonthonax, Laveaux’s civil superior and the man who had declared the emancipation of all the slaves in the colony. Sonthonax and his co-commissioner Polverel had last been heard of defending Port-au-Prince from the English; rumors of their defeated exodus had begun to reach Toussaint, but he had not yet confirmed them to his own satisfaction.

Eastward in his own rear were mountains and still more mountains, receding to the high range that marked the border with Spanish Santo Domingo, and encamped in these mountains were other black leaders who, like Toussaint himself, were for the moment in the service of royalist Spain and so at war with Republican France. At Marmelade, perhaps, was Biassou, and at Dondon Jean-François. Both were generals of the Spanish army; Toussaint had served beside them both, but now there was discontent between the two. There was discontent between both of them and Toussaint. Biassou and Jean-François commanded more men than he, but less securely; their men were less well trained and perhaps less loyal to their leaders. There was the question of who, ultimately, would be master, if there were to be just one.

Unlike the other black leaders now in the Spanish camp, Toussaint was served by various informants as far away as Europe—a place which he could only construct from their reports, since he had never left the island of his birth. Even as their enemy, he maintained certain contacts among the French Republican whites; it was no accident that his proclamation at Camp Turel had been issued on the same day that Commissioner Sonthonax had announced the abolition of slavery in all Saint Domingue. Yet Sonthonax had made
his
statement from a position of great weakness, as events now seemed to prove.

As for Toussaint himself, his name was not yet known to many—as he had, up to now, preferred. With the proclamation from Camp Turel he had committed himself to step out of the shadows which had hidden and comforted him throughout the first years of the slave rebellion. In which direction ought he to go from here? The English invaders certainly meant to uphold and restore slavery, along with the interests of the white and colored landowners who were their allies in the west. And for all their support of the black rebels, the Spanish also maintained slavery in their own territory, though with considerably less fervor—yet there was no thought of abolition there. The beleaguered French Republicans in the colony were currently declared for general liberty, for the little their actual force was worth, but whether that declaration would be confirmed in Europe was unknown. Toussaint understood the colony to be tossed among the European powers like a precious bauble, a stake or a pawn in their games of war. As yet he did not know enough to reason his way to an outcome. The bits of information he possessed lay quietly in his mind, like seeds.

He narrowed his vision now as he closed his eyes almost completely, his mental map contracting toward its center: his own men camped in concentric rings around the
grand’case
and the cane mill of Habitation Thibodet. Somewhere among them would be the new man who had come today, bearing the useful story about André Rigaud, the mulatto general who was fighting the English in the south. Guiaou. The scars made him memorable, the story more so. He would be resting now, after that long wandering. This thought itself was restful to Toussaint, who spread his hands on his knees and slept, still sitting upright in the chair, until the rain had altogether stopped.