All Souls' Rising (22 page)

After a long time walking we saw a wagon and beside it one man riding a horse. We came near but before we could see them well the horseman began riding down on us and our people scattered, thinking that what he had in his hand must be a saber or a knife, though it was only a switch when I saw it near. He swung at me with it and almost fell from the horse and I might have caught him and dragged him down but just then I saw that it was he who had killed the dog at Arnaud’s place and I was so surprised that I did nothing. A few ran after him a little way but they could not keep up with the horse.

So we all went down together toward the wagon. It was pleasant to see them like they were, all stunned and blind with misery, the same expressions as our people wore when they were carted from the barracoons to the slave market at Le Cap. The Congo walked all around the wagon to admire them while the rest of us watched from where we stood. The whitewomen had all been used already till they were nothing but bloody bags, so we probably would have killed them all except for a strange thing which happened.

The one whitewoman who was driving the wagon was different from any whitewoman I had ever seen before. She stood up with an odd stiffness as though something was crowding into her body beside her, as though she was a
serviteur
though this could not be. When she spoke it sounded like the voice of a
loa
. The Congo grabbed at her as much to drive the
loa
out as to get her ring, I think, but that was not what happened. No one of us could have believed that any whitewoman would do what she did then. Of course the women of Guinée would often swallow their tongues and strangle their own children to take them home to freedom that way. But we had not thought any whitewoman could cut her own limb free of a trap and when we saw her do it, we did not know what to do about her anymore. We let them go by then, without touching them at all, not even taking the water they had with them in the wagon. They moved very slowly, and it was long before they went out of sight, long after the horseman had joined them again. An hour later I looked back and thought I could still see the wagon as a dot or a fleck of ash where the land ran into the smoking sky.

On the afternoon of that day we came upon Jeannot leading a big party back to Le Cap. So many they were they’d swollen from the road and many were walking over the fields though these were still hot enough to blister your feet. Jeannot was leading them all and carrying a white baby stuck onto a spear. The baby was newborn, or notborn even, and it was not quite dead but could still move its arms and legs a little the way a frog does when you stick it. I looked at it wondering why if it was not dead it did not cry.

It was different to see this thing than to make the words that say it—as terrible but in a different way. You cannot understand this when you only see the words I make. I knew this was a thing the whitemen had done before. They carried colored children on spears this way when they were attacking
les gens de couleur
, their cousins, in the west. But it was different to hear about it than to see it. When I looked I knew for the first time what it was we were doing and what we all wanted although I could not make the words for that either. Riau and Ogûn and I all wanted this thing together though we couldn’t say what the thing was, but I knew that I would follow the spear and what was on it, where it would lead me.

Then the whitemen must have known too, carrying such a standard, they must have known where they meant to go. But it was a long time later before I thought of that.

Achille and Aiguy and César-Ami were all in Jeannot’s gang then. Still there was no water I could find but César-Ami had rum so I drank some of that. From them I heard how it was that we were going to Le Cap. There should have been a rising there when the plantations were all burned on the plain, but someone had given up the secret and the whitemen had killed several of the leaders and the others were afraid, so nothing had happened—it was like in Macandal’s time. Also most of them with a taste for killing had come out onto the plain with us.

But Jeannot had got word that the soldiers of Le Cap had set out for Limbé that morning, so with the city naked it seemed that we might take it after all. While we were going there another strange thing happened. A gang of young whitemen, only a few, came riding out toward us with no guns, only whips that they waved and snapped. They ordered us, in our thousands, to go back to our masters on the plantations, and told us our punishment would be light if we obeyed. This was ordinary whiteman madness, not like what that woman had done, but still I think these must have been very stupid young men. They were pulled down off their horses and Jeannot commanded them to be skinned, meaning to send their skins back where they’d come from, as a sign. But whiteman skin is so flimsy we could not get a whole pelt off any of them. At the end they lay flayed on the coals of the cane field screaming and begging for death, and we trampled over them all of us as we went on toward Le Cap, so I think they had died by the time we had all passed over.

We could not come into the city at once because of a fort with guns, so we attacked this fort and the soldiers that were there. It was not a real army that we had yet, and people ran up on the cannon carelessly and many were killed. Later I heard that Paul Lefu was killed this time, but I did not see it. It was only a low earthwork fort and if we did not fear the cannon it was easy to get into it. No one feared. I did not even have to have Ogûn in my head that time, but I could be still myself and willing to toss my body away. I was running right behind Achille when he tossed away his gun and wrapped himself around a cannon’s mouth calling out to everyone behind him, “Come, brothers, I am holding it for you!” I saw the artillery sergeant’s eyes swell wide and yellow while Achille grinned at him down the cannon’s barrel and I almost reached him before he fired the touchhole, but not quite. Achille kept grinning and his hands held tight to the gun carriage even after the rest of him had been blown half across the field in a bloody net to catch the others’ faces. I cut the artilleryman’s head half off while he was trying to get his pistol unstuck from his belt and I took the pistol for myself along with the belt and his powder and lead.

The soldiers in the fort surrendered then, believing the game would be played by the rules whitemen use on each other or wanting to believe it. Jeannot lined them up and had their throats cut like cattle at the slaughter and he went from one to the next drinking their blood he caught in his cupped hands and screaming praises to the
loa
. Many of us did the same. But then the other soldiers came back from Limbé and there was a worse fight. We wanted to shoot the cannons at them but we didn’t know yet how it was with cannons and when we put the balls in before the powder the cannons wouldn’t fire. So after a while the soldiers drove us off.

Achille was killed and again I didn’t know what had happened to the others. I didn’t know what had happened to Jean-Pic or César-Ami, and I didn’t know about Merbillay. We had come farther than we meant from the place in the mountains where the women and children were hidden. After the soldiers chased us away from the fort, most of us went running back to the plain, but I caught a horse I found wandering loose and rode away by myself alone.

Chapter Thirteen

I
N
L
E
C
AP THERE WAS NO SUNRISE
; billows of black smoke rolled in from the northern plain and blotted out the light. All through the town it was raining feathery flakes of ash, and hot cinders too sometimes, which threatened to set the roofs alight. But few attended to this danger. No blacks from the plain had breached the town’s defenses, but the
petit blancs
had risen in a riot and traveled the streets in mobs, hanging whatever mulattoes they might find from the lampposts or shooting them or slashing them to death with knives, for as the first white survivors began to trickle in from the plantations the rumor spread that Ogé’s colored co-conspirators had raised the insurrection of the slaves.

Captain Maillart rode about aimlessly from quarter to quarter of the town; he had been doing so for a little better than an hour. Together with the saber and dragoon’s pistol he commonly carried, he had equipped himself with an infantryman’s musket, carried in a makeshift sling against his saddle skirt. He had been one of the small scouting party that went out into the plain at dawn as the first refugees straggled in from the countryside, and one of a few to survive a misfortunate encounter with a huge band of brigand blacks. Badly as he’d been shaken by what he’d seen then, he’d volunteered at once for the expedition to Limbé, but Thouzard had detached him along with some few others to remain and keep order in the town—now a plainly impossible project.

Most of the other soldiers had shut themselves in the barracks to wait for the riots to wear themselves out, knowing that the
petit blancs
might attack them, in their weakened numbers, almost as readily as they’d set upon mulattoes or blacks. Maillart, however, preferred to remain on the move, though unsupported as he was he could do little of real use. The town’s small body of regular police had either joined with the rioters or barred themselves behind their doors to wait it out. Some householders had banded together to do what they might to contain the present danger of fire, wetting down roofs and wooden walls and smothering hot cinders before they could ignite. The wind that brought the coals and ash in from the plain could spread a fire quickly all over the city if ever a fire was well started.

His horse at least was a steady campaigner, unafraid of smoke or sparks. But at the edge of the town even this horse grew restive, shifting its hooves and flaring its nostrils. Captain Maillart himself felt a shock to the roots of his system repeated each time he looked at the spectacle there. Beyond the ridge of Morne du Cap was something that his imagination could only compare with a storm over some brimstone lake of hell. A hundred degrees of the horizon were luridly edged with a red fire glow. Above this smoldering ring rose great black billows of smoke like thunderheads with long tongues of flame stabbing up through them to lick the belly of the sky. But there was no sky, only the sooty haze from which the ash and coals kept hailing down.

Here some few other officers of the Regiment Le Cap were ministering to the survivors still intermittently trickling out of this inferno. Most were advised to seek shelter in the houses of friends, if they had friends, since the hospital and the convent were already overcrowded. Captain Maillart looked over their soot-streaked staring faces. He would have liked to inquire about his friend Antoine Hébert, but he saw little hope in doing so. Most who survived were women and children and these could report that their men had been mostly slain on the spot, before their eyes. Maillart knew from the events of the morning that women and children would not always be spared either.

He headed his horse back into the town, where the prospect was no more encouraging. The streets were awash with a surf of
petit blancs
, scouring the neighborhoods for new victims, some now openly breaking into mulatto houses. There were no blacks or
gens de couleur
abroad, save those who hung bloody and loll-tongued from window embrasures and posts. By now the wave of murderous retaliation had mostly passed over, leaving a festival of rape and looting in its wake. Maillart was not an especially canny political analyst but he did understand that these outrages stemmed as much from resentment of mulatto wealth as from any connection
les gens de couleur
might have had to the slave rebellion. Also he recognized, exchanging glances with the pop-eyed dangling men he passed, that many in the mob would be as glad to see him swing among them.

In his unhappiness over the likely doom of the doctor, Captain Maillart began to think of Nanon and the other mulatto women who were variously attached to his regiment. Immediately he felt certain of what must have already happened to them, but just the same he nudged his horse into a trot and rode up to the area below the Place d’Armes where most of these women kept their lodgings. As he’d expected, the door to Nanon’s rooms was stove in. He dismounted and stepped over the threshold, holding the horse at the length of the unslung reins. The front room was dim and quiet, there seemed to be some scurrying noise in the back. In the poor light he stepped on something and almost lost his footing: a pawn from the chess set that shot out from under the edge of his boot and twirled into a corner. The room was a ruin, all the fragile furniture overturned and dismembered, hangings slashed, the glass all hammered out of the mirror frames. At the sound of his movement a squirrel face poked out from the bedroom, a looter rolling opulent dresses into a large bundle.

“Come out of there,” Maillart called brusquely, but the looter only dodged behind the door frame. The captain cursed and looked over his shoulder at the horse; he didn’t dare step away from the animal, certainly not leave him tethered there. He called a warning, drew his pistol and after a moment’s pause fired through the inner doorway. The looter did not stir or show himself but the ball struck loose a hinge from a bamboo jalousie and through the window thus uncovered Maillart could see some commotion in the inner courtyard. He reloaded his pistol and primed it and remounted and rode around to investigate.

Immediately he recognized the woman Fleur, with whom he’d enjoyed the occasional most exquisite dalliance; she was lying on her back near the central well with a number of men raping her in turn. There seemed no longer any need to hold her down; her arms shivered loosely in the dust like the wings of a hen under treading, and her eyes showed only white, as if she were dead. Captain Maillart wondered if she were not dead, in fact. With each lunge of the man who’d presently skewered her, the top of her head knocked against the well’s bricked rim. In the shadows under a shanty lean-to against the rear wall of a house a great fat black woman in a white headcloth stood watching the scene impassively with her heavy lips set firmly together. Near her two shirtless blacks stood similarly immobile, one holding a spotted pony on a rope. They seemed less interested than the animal they held, but Maillart was no more appalled by their indifference than by his own. He could feel nothing and he thought that there was nothing he could do. With a snort one rapist withdrew and another assumed his place and despite his grunts and the mutters of those encouraging him the sound of Fleur’s head bumping on the bricks seemed louder than anything else.

He would likely have done no more than ride away at this point, but just then someone burst out of the lean-to, a woman with her hands held out to him. He was distracted for a moment because the spotted pony had begun to kick and buck, jockeying the two blacks halfway across the courtyard to the well as they strove to control it. But the woman was Nanon; they must have hidden her there, beneath that heap of tattered sailcloth someone had been remaking into slave clothes. Her face was a welter of snot and tears and she called out chokingly for him to save her from the men who’d already diverted themselves from Fleur to seize her and tear at her clothing. There was Faustin the baker along with a man Maillart had never seen before, and the disreputable farrier Crozac. Maillart shouted for them to stop and took the musket from its sling without waiting to see their response.

Faustin caught Nanon by the wrist and she spun half around with both arms spread wide; she had not quite reached Maillart’s horse. The captain chopped out another order and deftly fixed the bayonet to the musket. He sat the horse, balancing the unfamiliar weapon with one hand round the trigger guard. Nanon could not break Faustin’s grip, but she drew her captured wrist toward her face and closed her wide mouth over his hand, crunching down on the small bones clustered like a chicken back. Faustin shouted and let go; he would have hit her with his unhurt fist but he saw the bayonet probing for his face and he fell back, along with the third man. The dozen or so other men in the yard had formed a loose line around Maillart’s horse and were waiting to see what would happen.

Crozac rushed up and clutched at Nanon’s hair, yanking her head back by the scalp, exposing her long pulsing neck and a taut face distorted by the sudden pain. Maillart spoke to him crisply, not too loud, trying for the tone of authority which these folk would often follow before they fully knew they would obey, but Crozac was beyond this. His eyes were furrowed shut like badly sutured scars and his face looked nothing but a mask of bad teeth. In his unconsciousness he had pressed the woman full against the saddle skirt and Maillart’s booted foot. The captain touched him with the bayonet point, at the neckless join of Crozac’s head and shoulders, but the man did not seem aware of him at all. Maillart returned the glance of some of the whites watching him and thought of the hanged men who’d be his blind and silent companions if his choice of action proved to be mistaken. He reversed the musket and gripped it with both hands about the barrel and brought it down with maybe half his force into the center of the farrier’s forehead.

Crozac sat down sharply with a
whumpf
and a puff of dust. His eyes jumped farther open with the blow and he took a noisy breath in through his mouth. Maillart held out a hand to Nanon and she swarmed up his whole arm at once, swinging a leg over the saddle and splitting her skirt as her weight settled down. The captain lifted the reins with his left hand and with the other brandished the musket over his head like a javelin. Her arms cinched around his waist as he dug heels in the horse’s side and cantered out of the yard.

D
OCTOR
H
ÉBERT AND HIS BATTERED
and exhausted party had reached Le Cap at last, exactly when he could not say. The cinder-black sky gave no clue of the time and he felt himself to be passing within some sort of damned eternity. The Flaville family kept a house in town where the women might retreat, but after the doctor had escorted them there he excused himself and headed for the Place d’Armes, going afoot and leading his spent horse by the reins. The scenes through which he passed defeated his understanding. There was as much ruin and death about as if the slaves had overrun the town although he had been told that this had been prevented. Whatever rage had swept the place had drifted into its doldrums and he was alone on the streets now except for the dead. He was itching to find Nanon; though there was no vestige of passion in him or even interest really, he felt a blunt obligation to see to her safety if he could.

He hitched his horse to a rail by her broken door and walked across the gutted ruin of her rooms. The floor was carpeted with splinters of furniture and chunks of broken mirror glass. The doctor stooped and picked up one of these, just large enough to show him his own eye. A heap of fresh human excrement fumed warmly near one wall. Everything that was not stolen had been carefully insulted and destroyed. The bed was stripped and marked with crisscrossing streaks of urine. The doctor stepped through the back door into the courtyard, where he saw a woman struggling feebly to get up onto her knees. She looked to have been raped to ribbons, and the doctor was becoming so inured to such sights that it took him a moment to realize that this was Nanon’s sometime companion, Fleur.

He moved to lift Fleur by the shoulders, but she would not or could not stand. Her lassitude was more uncooperative than dead weight. The doctor twisted his head around until he noticed Maman-Maigre hunkered in her lean-to, and he began to back in that direction, Fleur’s heels furrowing the dust as they dragged behind.

Three chickens clucked and scattered from their way. The doctor laid Fleur’s shoulders down softly as he might by the dead embers of Maman-Maigre’s cook fire. There was a pail of water standing near and the doctor sopped a rag of rotten sailcloth in it and uncertainly began cleaning the crust from Fleur’s belly. At his first touch she moaned and convulsed onto her side. Maman-Maigre took the rag from him and continued the task herself and the doctor gratefully turned his eyes elsewhere. He did not look again until Maman-Maigre had covered Fleur’s legs with the remains of her clothing. The black woman sat cross-legged, holding Fleur’s head on her hammy thigh. The younger woman’s eyes were closed completely now and she breathed easily as a sleeper. All over the yard the ghostly ash continued to feather down. The doctor asked Maman-Maigre several times over if she knew what had happened to Chloe or Jasmine or Nanon, but though he spoke slowly in the clearest Creole he could manage, she would not answer him at all.

At dusk he came stumbling through the northmost quarter of the town into Les Casernes, where he thought he might at least safely stable his horse. When he asked for Maillart the captain came running and almost knocked him over with the surprise of his embrace. He conducted the doctor to his quarters where he broached a bottle of brandy which the doctor was very glad to taste. With his throat so warmed he told of what had happened to him and what he had witnessed: the slaying of Lambert, and how Duvel’s head had grinned down on him from its stake, and how Madame Arnaud had saved them all, as he believed, by sacrificing her finger to the Congo.

At that the captain drew in his breath and looked as if he would make some remark, but when he did speak he told another tale. How he’d gone out at dawn to reconnoiter on the plain with a small body of foot soldiers who’d unexpectedly fallen in with rebel slaves, surprised and outnumbered so completely they’d all been slaughtered save himself and a few others who’d outdistanced the marauders on horseback. Because it was only Antoine Hébert and not another military man the captain could confess the shame he felt at fleeing before blacks and the shock of knowing he had no better hope to save his life. And here he hesitated, but finally went on to say he’d seen something more dreadful than a head raised on a spear: an infant’s corpse and what was worse it seemed to have been torn untimely from the womb.