All Souls' Rising (15 page)

Also, some of the people then at Bois Cayman had been kings in their own country. It was not hard for them to believe that these whitemen would go against the right of a king. Some said that the whitemen had made the king a prisoner in France and that they sent him to work in French fields every day with his family. Some said that the King In France was a black man and came out of Dahomey like ourselves.

Boukman stood up. He did not need to sit on anyone’s shoulders to be seen, he was head and shoulders above the rest, standing on the ground. He wore white trousers and a red sash with a sword in it. His head was big enough for two men and the lower part of his face hung over his bare chest like an open door. Before he spoke we all could feel his
esprit
. It was not one
loa
riding him that night, but all
les Morts et les Mystères
.

Boukman told then that the King In France would send his army over the sea to make the
colons
obey his law. But that we, the people of Guinée, must not wait for the king’s army to cross the ocean. We would rise and claim the new law for ourselves.

Then Boukman looked at the
petro
drummers and they began to beat. The
la-place
began going backward around the
poteau mitan
, as if he would undo time and bring us home to Guinée where we came from. It was Jeannot who was dancing
la-place
that night, and as he moved backward the
hounsis
began to sing to Legba, as we must always do at the beginnings of things.

Papa Legba

Open the way for me

When I have passed

I will thank the loa

Papa Legba

Open the gate
…

Then Legba came to ride Jeannot. I watched carefully because it is rare. Jeannot toppled back and the
hounsis
caught him and when he could stand again he was Legba, Legba grown old, crippled, walking on broken legs and his arms twisted in deformity, his whole self crushed down under the weight of the big
macoutte
he had to carry as far as the end of the world. The
hounsis
sang.

Attibon Legba, limping along

It’s a long time since we have seen you

I will carry Legba’s macoutte

Put his straw sack on my back
…

Legba was coming toward where we were standing now, and in his face I saw Grand Bois D’Ilet, master of the Island Below Sea, where the
loa
live among
les Morts et les Mystères
. He was coming down, down into the mirror himself, already Legba could see his shadow rising there. A step ahead of me, Achille stiffened and dropped his gun as he was taken, but it was not Ghede this time. His ruined body straightened and became young and strong again for the
loa
, the muscle throbbed across his back as he lifted his arms in the shape of a cross, ridden by Maît’Carrefour.

Legba, Grand Bois, Legba—inside Jeannot’s body Legba saluted Carrefour with his sly smile. These
loa
know each other well, because they both sit on the gate. Legba opens the way for the day
loa
, but the
loa
of night, who must sometimes work evil, all pass through the hand of Maît’Carrefour. So they cannot always agree, but tonight they smiled on each other like brothers, and danced with each other, hand in hand. I didn’t see Ghede, not yet, but I knew he was there, below the bright surface of the mirror that turns your image back, his hand now holding Carrefour’s other hand. The
hounsis
sang.

O Creole, sondé miroir, O Legba
…

By my side Aiguy trembled as Baron Samedi mounted him. He stepped forward to join Legba and Carrefour, dancing around the edge of the peristyle. The high whine of
petro
drumming shrilled inside Riau’s head.
Yo di
, the mirror breaks through rock. The ocean is mirror, mirror is ocean, by day we see ourselves in it, but when it turns transparent then we see through into the Island Below Sea which is the world of death, where
les Morts et les Mystères
reach up into our world, climbing Grand Bois’s tree from the dark side of the mirror. They were shooting up the
poteau mitan
now, as fast as the
vévés
written in gunpowder could burn. Now I saw Ghede dancing everywhere in the peristyle, one, two, many Ghedes. The drum scratched at the inside of Riau’s head, Ogûn wanting his body to dance, wanted his
ti-bon-ange
to make way for Ogûn. But I wanted my own head for thinking with, and so I stepped away, moving somewhere I could not hear the drums so well.

But the forest itself was crowded with
esprit
. I walked in the shadows just outside the tree line, feeling it. I was farther away but still I was circling the
poteau mitan
. There were so many to be drawn up from the Island Below Sea. I knew that our living people outnumbered the whitemen ten to one. The whitemen knew it too and were afraid—this was the fear that drove the whip. But what the whitemen never knew was that every one of us they killed was with us still. And by this time they had killed so many, a hundred to our one. A dead white person disappears but our dead never leave us, they are here among
les Invisibles
. They were coming now, all
les Invisibles
, through the mirror from below the waters, and every tree in Bois Cayman became a
poteau mitan
for their arrival.

Walking around the edge of the clearing I came to Damballah’s tree and there I stopped and squatted down. Damballah came out of the hole in his tree. No one was watching him, only me. He crawled between the bars of the crate and put his head in the bowl to eat his food. His split tongue flicked in and out of the egg and milk, trying it before he drank. His scales were dark and glossy on his back and his small round eye shone when it looked at me. I raised my head then and I saw Toussaint, squatting down on the other side of the crate. I don’t know when he had come there. Jean-François and Biassou were sitting a few yards in back of him, talking together in low voices. I couldn’t hear what they said.

Later, a long time afterward, people said different things about what Toussaint was doing that night. Some say he led the ceremony himself and cut the black sow’s throat with his own hand. Some say he never went to Bois Cayman at all. I know that he was there. Who knows what is true? Maybe he was there, or not there, but I know that I saw him, if few others did. All the time they were feeding the
loa
he and I sat talking quietly beneath Damballah’s tree.

“
Parrain
,” I said. I was the first to speak.

Toussaint nodded. I could see his face plain in the torchlight from the peristyle. His mouth was pursed slightly like he was whistling and his eyes looked cheerful, torchlight flashing in them. Like always he wore the bandanna tied around his head and he wore the green coat with the old bloodstains. He looked like he had been squatting there for a year, but I was surprised to see him there at all, because I thought that he served jesus, who had made him swear against serving the
loa
.

“
Ehé, Riau, sa ki pasé?
” he said. “What are you thinking?”

“I was thinking about Macandal,” I said. When I said this, I knew where my thought had gone. Macandal was with us now, he had come up the
poteau mitan
at the head of
les Invisibles
. And with Macandal leading, the whitemen must all die. They were singing it now within the peristyle.

Eh, eh, Bomba

Canga, bafio té!

Canga, moune de lé!

Canga, do ki la

Canga, li!

The
mambo
stood up, all stained with blood from the sacrifice. Boukman was mixing blood with gunpowder and
clairin
to feed the
loa
, and most of the people were pressing forward to get some, whether the
loa
had mounted them or not. Jeannot raised his cup above his head and screamed into the sky before he drank, but I, Riau, I did not taste the blood that night.

Toussaint was looking at me as he would do when I was small, when I had understood something and he was trying not to show his pleasure. Then he turned his head to watch what was happening in the peristyle. In the torchlight I could just see the tips of his teeth. A big mosquito landed on his broad flat cheek and fastened itself to feed.

“You know what happened to Macandal,” he said. “The white-men burned him to death in a fire. And it was one of our own people who gave him up to the whites.”

“Do you think Macandal is like Jesus?” I said. “You are wrong.”

Now Toussaint smiled a little, openly. He felt the mosquito, finally, and flicked his finger at it. He didn’t kill it though. Maybe he didn’t mean to kill it. The mosquito lifted, whining high above his head, and vanished in the dark.

“I know what happened to Macandal,” I said. “Macandal turned himself into a mosquito,
yo di
. Who knows? Maybe this is the mosquito who has bitten you.”

J
ULY
1802

From the deck of Le
Héros
, Placide surveyed the harbor of Brest. The dawn was windy and warm, a pleasant July day in store. Later it might grow hot, but nothing to match the stifling heat of a tropical summer. In spite of himself, Placide was refreshed by French weather, French summers at least. He’d grown accustomed to them during the years he’d spent here as a student, or as he now more bitterly conceived it, as a hostage. Though the winters were hard, indeed, and made him wish for Saint Domingue. They had embarked in winter, scarcely six months before, and from this port. Even then Placide had not believed the blandishments of the First Consul, yet his heart had been sweetened by the thought of home.

He watched a sailor now, or maybe he was some sort of long-shoreman, unfastening the mooring of a longboat from a stanchion on the quay. He was whiskered and wore a striped shirt and on his head an old liberty cap, conical with the odd forward roll of its peak. Or once it had been that. They had made the old King Louis wear such a cap before they killed him, and wearing it, he drank a toast to
liberté, egalité, fraternité
. Placide had seen an engraving in a newspaper, the
bonnet rouge
shoved down over the king’s powdered wig. The king looked bilious, sickly, holding his wine cup at an insecure angle as if he would spill it. From his lips scrolled the phrase
Vive La Nation
, upside down and curling sideways, like a thread of smoke.

The sailor let the stern rope slither down into the boat, which rocked and drifted out from the posts of the dock. The cap he wore was ancient, grubby, faded to a scabrous brown, though once it had surely been red as a poppy. The tricolor cockade had been cut away and someone had flattened the peak and tacked it down backward with a few stitches, further to disguise its original shape. The sailor left the bowline doubled around the stanchion while he scrambled down, then pulled it free and coiled it neatly under a bench seat before he sat down and engaged the oars. A spiral of silver twirled out from the starboard blade as he brought the bow of the boat around toward the harbor. Placide watched as he settled to a longer, even stroke; the boat was too heavy for him to move it very quickly. Somehow he doubted that revolution had much bettered this sailor’s lot.

The harbor was full of warships; the sailor was rowing in the direction of one of these. Pennants snapped briskly from their rigging in the freshening morning breeze. All around the talk was of war renewed with England. Perhaps with all Europe, once again. No one would tell them anything directly, but the rumors were in the air. It had been the same when the fleet sailed out from Brest with the army of Captain-General Leclerc: official silence through which the rumors breathed of Napoleon’s real intent.