All Souls' Rising (16 page)

The ship’s officer Chabron drifted up to his elbow, and when Placide did not immediately recognize his presence, Chabron plucked at the sleeve of his plain brown coat. Placide hesitated, looking over the water. The sun had just cleared the roofs of the town and that sailor’s longboat was burned away in the reflective blaze.

“
Venez, monsieur
,” Chabron said. “He’s ready for you.”

Placide nodded and followed Chabron below decks. All during the voyage they had kept Toussaint sequestered from his family and even from his body servant, Mars Plaisir, but in the fortnight they’d been docked at Brest, Placide had been permitted to serve as his secretary. Chabron unlocked the cabin door and stood aside, his face averted, for Placide to enter. Placide could hear the key grinding in the lock behind him, once the door had closed; he heard no footsteps moving away.

The cabin was close, almost airless, with a ripening odor whose source was hard to fix. During the voyage Toussaint had been allowed a weekly bath but he still had no clothing but what he’d been arrested in. Placide could hear rats scrambling between the cabin wall and the ship’s hull. Toussaint sat calmly at the table, eyes shaded by one hand. A whale-oil lamp was the illumination. Because there was no daylight, this always seemed a timeless place.

The quill and ink pot sat on the table, by a stack of vellum which the Bible weighted down. Placide knew that Toussaint would have made no notes, that he would have spent some part of the night and the earliest hours of the morning composing in his mind the things he meant to say. He sat down. Toussaint, reaching to move the Bible from the sheets of paper, brushed his hand as if by chance.

“
Bôjou, Placide
.”

“
Bôjou, m’pé
.”

They sat side by side, for Toussaint liked to read over his work as he progressed. But he would not begin at once.

“
Ta mére?
” Toussaint asked him. “
Tes fréres?
” The same questions each morning of the fortnight. “
Tout va bien?
”

“
Oui, ça va
,” Placide said, and when Toussaint inquired of his niece and daughter-in-law, Louise and Victoire, Placide replied that their health was also good. With his thumb he turned up the cap of the inkwell on its hinge, and then sat back.

“There’s talk of war with England,” he said, and then added quickly in Creole, “I wish it had come sooner.”

“That would be a treasonable thought,” Toussaint said stiffly, and in good French. “You know that I have always been loyal to France.”

What Placide knew was that Chabron or someone else must certainly be listening at the door, but again he thought he knew that dissimulation was pointless now; appearances no longer mattered. Irritably he fidgeted with the inkwell, flipping the cover open and shut.

“If there had been war with England,” Toussaint said precisely, “the Captain-General’s fleet would not have sailed, perhaps, and then I would have missed the sight of you, my child.”

Placide jerked his head toward the porthole, but it had been nailed shut. So fearful they were of Toussaint’s escape, they’d kept it boarded over even in the middle of the ocean.

“Come,” Toussaint said. “It’s time that we begin.”

Placide drew a sheet of paper toward him from the stack, picked up the pen and dipped it. Toussaint composed himself, drawing his hands back from the table and folding them in his lap.

“
Citoyen Premier Consul
,” he began. Placide wrote down the phrase, waited a moment, then wrote the date above it.
22 juin 1802
. Toussaint tilted his head to look at his writing and gave an affirmative nod. He cleared his throat and spoke again, repeating the salutation.

“
Citoyen Premier Consul, je ne vous dissimulerai pas mes fautes, j’en ai fait quelques unes. Quel homme en est exempt? Je suis prête à les avouer. Après la parole d’honneur du capitaine generale qui represente le gouvernement, après une proclamation promulgué à la face de la colonie, dans laquelle il promettait de jeter le voile de l’oubli sur les évènements qui ont eu lieu à Sainte Domingue, comme vous avez fait le 18 brumaire, je me suis retiré au sein de ma famille
…”
^*2

At other times Toussaint might grope, fumble for a word, torture his amanuensis for alternative expressions. Sometimes he would have several secretaries compose versions of the same letter before settling on a final result. But Placide thought that he must have worked out this phrasing completely and probably memorized it the night before.

“
À peine un mois s’est ecoulé que des malveillants, à force d’intrigues, ont su me perdre dans l’ésprit du general en chef en lui inspirant de la méfiance contre moi. J’ai reçu une lettre de lui qui m’ordonnait de me concerte avec le general Brunet: j’ai obei
…”
^†3

He spoke in a high clear voice, as if he were giving a speech, and loud enough to carry well beyond the door. His only pauses were oratorical, for effect, but they did give Placide time to write. He felt as it were two invisible threads competing to control his quill. One ran to the hand of the Abbé Coisnon, the preceptor who’d had charge of Isaac and Placide here in France, who’d taught Placide the fair hand and the proper spelling he now used, which Toussaint’s sidelong glance approved.

“
Je me rendis, accompagné de deux personnes, aux Gonaives ou l’on m’arrêta. L’on me conduisit à bord de la frégate La Creole, j’ignore pour quel motif, sans autres vêtements que ceux que j’avais sur moi. Le lende-main ma maison fut en proie au pillage; mon épouse et mes enfants arrêtés: ils n’ont rien, pas même de quoi se vêtir
…”
^*4

The other filament, meanwhile, was strung more tautly over the years, stretched to transparency before it reached the plank cabin at Bréda where Toussaint had first taught him how to make the letters. Placide half wanted now to see his father’s own crabbed hand and broken orthography scrambling over the page beneath his pen; it would seem somehow more just. But he continued to write in the clean correct fashion which the Abbé Coisnon had drilled into him.

“A new paragraph,” Toussaint said. “
Citoyen Premier Consul, une mère de famille, à cinquante-trois ans, peut mériter indulgence
…”

The pen had dulled. Placide shifted in his seat and automatically felt his pockets but there was nothing there. He clicked his tongue irritably and got up, quill in hand, and crossed the cabin to rap sharply on the inside of the door. The pause that followed was forced; Placide knew that Chabron must be standing just outside the door, counting off one, two minutes, to make it appear that he was coming from a distance. When he opened the door at last, Placide passed the quill to him wordlessly. Chabron would not meet his eyes. He knew the officer found this procedure shameful, gave him credit for that much. They would not let Toussaint come near a penknife, though it could not be that they feared his suicide, which would have gladdened them indeed, but that with so slight a weapon he might seize control of the ship.

Chabron sharpened the quill with his own knife, eyes fixed to the work as though it required his utmost concentration, and passed it back to Placide when he was done. Toussaint was waiting, the words began to flow from him as soon as Placide had resumed his seat.

“
Citoyen Premier Consul, une mère de famille, a 53 ans, peut mériter l’indulgence et la bienveillance d’une nation genereuse et liberale; elle n’a aucun compte à rendre, moi seul dois être responsable de mon conduite aupres de mon gouvernement. J’ai une trop haute idée de la grandeur et de la justice du premier magistrat du peuple français, pour douter un moment de son impartialité. J’aime à croire que la balance, dans sa main, ne penchera pas plus d’un coté que de l’autre. Je réclame sa genererosite
.”
^*5

Toussaint reached to take the sheet from under Placide’s hand and held it near the lamp, reading it over while the last line dried. He took the pen and signed it. Placide blotted the signature, blew on it and watched the ink darken. There was no sealing wax so he simply folded the sheet in three and passed it out the door.

Two days later the news came that Toussaint was to be stripped of all his property, by the order of the First Consul. Henceforth he would truly own nothing but the clothes he had on. Placide was with him when the notification was delivered. Seldom had he seen his father really shaken, perhaps never. The spectacle frightened him, and Toussaint’s voice was not entirely steady.

“But I had no answer to my letter…” he began uncertainly.

“You have your answer there,” Placide snapped. His own fear made him cruel.

Then Toussaint disappeared behind his face. Placide had seen it often, during the campaign against Leclerc, most especially in those months Toussaint had spent at Ennery, “retired into the bosom of his family.” He thought he remembered it from his early childhood also, but was not so sure. That spark which was himself would sink away behind his features—you must know him well to know that it had not been extinguished altogether. In front of him he’d leave his face as hieratic and inscrutable as a carved wooden mask that some old African dancer might have worn. That was the aspect which made men smile and call him
old Toussaint
, and shake their heads in admiration of his cunning. What they meant was that Toussaint was old as Legba.

Placide dropped onto his knees and kissed his father’s hand. He closed his eyes and laid his cheek against the fraying shiny seam of the old uniform trousers. After a little while Toussaint’s free hand lowered gently onto his head as if to give a blessing.

It was left to Placide to break the news to his brothers and the women. Of all the group only Justine, the
femme de confiance
, wept openly, while Mars Plaisir groaned and wrung his elongated hands. It frightened them more deeply, Placide thought, to see their protector’s strength undone. Suzanne took the hands of Victoire and Louise and bowed her head to say the Lord’s Prayer, half in a whisper. Placide did not pray with her; he kept his head up, but the words still calmed him somewhat, each an old touchstone. After the Amen, his mother raised her eyes.

“I never cared for the good things we had,” she said. “But what will become of us now?”

“I fear we may be separated,” Placide said.

He was thinking that he himself would likely be distinguished from his brother Isaac, since he had chosen to join the rebels while Isaac had remained with the French. In the back of his mind was an idea that did not quite qualify as hope, that after all he might stay with his father, for that reason, still. But that afternoon Toussaint was taken off the ship to a cell in the château of Brest, while Placide remained in his quarters on board.

O
N THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD
Captain-General Leclerc took up his pen to report on his mission from his brother-in-law Napoleon: to subdue the blacks of Saint Domingue and to restore slavery there. Again, and again, he wrote to the Minister of Marine Decrès: “
Vous ne sauriez tenir Toussaint à une trop grande distance de la mer et le mettre dans une position très sure. Cet homme avait fanatisé le pays à un tel point que sa presence le mettrait encore en combustion
…”
^*6
A similar letter, more measured in tone but of the same general drift, had been delivered by Le
Héros
itself. All the way over the ocean it had smoldered in the captain’s cabin like a bomb on a slow fuse, burning word by word to its conclusion:

“
Il faut, Citoyen Ministre, que le Gouvernement le fasse mettre dans une place forte située dans le milieu de la France, afin que jamais il ne puisse avoir aucun moyen de s’echapper et de revenir à Saint Domingue ou il a toute l’influence d’un chef de secte. Si, dans trois ans, cet homme reparaissait a Sainte Domingue peut-être detruirait-il tout ce que la France y aurait fait
…”
^*7

Still Leclerc could not leave his theme. He wrote constantly, constantly begged for more men, more money to pay them, again more men. He was transfixed by his belief that if Toussaint were able to so much as wet his boot toe in the water of any French port, he would be magically translated back to Saint Domingue to spread fire and ruin and destruction. Leclerc’s wife of course was unfaithful to him, so were his troops disloyal—most of the surviving men had belonged to Toussaint’s black regiments. He was sick and feverish, mere months away from his own death. In a shaky hand he wrote Decrès: “
Ce n’est pas tout d’avoir enlevé Toussaint; il y a ici 2000 chefs à faire enlever
…”
^†8
Each night in his febrile sleep he dreamed that Toussaint had never really left the island.

N
EXT DAY IN
B
REST THE WEATHER TURNED
, the sky shelved over gray as slate, and spat cold rain. An unfamiliar army captain presented himself in Placide’s cabin, not troubling to give his name.

“You are ordered to remove and surrender the uniform of the French army,” he announced. “Being divested of your rank you are no longer entitled to wear it.”

Placide pointed out that in fact he was already in civilian attire. The captain nodded, quite as if he had expected this reply.

“You don’t wear the French uniform because you know you have disgraced it,” he suggested. “Because you are a traitor to France.”

“I am as much a traitor to France as my father was,” Placide said. “No more and no less.”

“Then you must be a very great one,” the captain said. “But the slave Toussaint cannot be your father.” He jerked his jaw at Placide’s reddish Arada skin. “Anyone can see that you are a mulatto half-breed, neither white nor black. Some white man got you on the nigger whore, your mother.”

The captain’s tone was rote, however. The insults were not heart-felt, but formal and obligatory; Placide understood that he must say these things in order to divorce himself as much as possible from his own actions. For himself it was a formal occasion too. No matter what age he might survive to, his life was ending here and now.