In Darkness (5 page)

Soon, though, there would be no more masters, and no more slaves. Or so Boukman hoped.

As always, one or two people flinched when they saw Toussaint. He suffered the misfortune of having been born hideous, with a face so ugly that even his wife had called him the Ogre. His nose was both flattened and swollen, an unusual combination, whilst his eyes were small and deep-set. He carried this face around with him everywhere; it was like a calling card, a badge. He was known by it.

But, he reasoned, perhaps it was better to be known than not. Then no one could say that you had never existed; no one could turn you into a ghost. Since an early age, Toussaint had held the conviction that one day he would achieve something great, that one day everyone would know his name. Yet, until now, he had done nothing but heal the occasional sick person and tend his master’s horses (which, for the most part, lived in conditions markedly superior to those of the sick people). He did not even know how to read and write, and it struck him as he stood in that marshy place, with the torchlight flickering through the trees, that it was too late. He was too old.

Toussaint looked over at Boukman. The man was nearly as aged as Toussaint himself – in his late forties, at least. His face was a criss-cross of incisions. His pride and his tribal belonging had been cut into his skin when he was a child, and now he was on the other side of the world, and was allowed no pride and no belongings.

The ground underfoot was spongy and wet. This was marshland, the Bois Caiman, and Toussaint could see in the darkness to the west, silently slithering, the alligators that had given the wooded depression its name. He shivered, although the air was warm and humid.

What are we doing?
he thought.
This is madness.

Toussaint had always felt out of place – he was too clever for his confrères, but too black to truly socialize with his master. His twin sister, born one minute after him, had died of diphtheria before she could walk, and he could only remember her now as an indiscriminately visaged ghost, a blur on little chubby limbs, giggling. He had never had friends. He had never considered himself as belonging to a society of slaves, only as an individual – and this ceremony was no different. He couldn’t totally give himself up to this hysteria, but nor could he repudiate it. Africa was in his blood, even if he wasn’t of the Dahomey race that had been primarily responsible for bringing vodou to Haiti.

He slowly made his way over to the assembly and Boukman greeted him warmly. They had first met many years ago, for Boukman was a close friend of Pierre-Baptiste, Toussaint’s godfather, who had taught Boukman his smattering of Latin and theology. After Pierre-Baptiste had died, Boukman had continued to come to Toussaint’s home, had drunk with him, played cards with him, talked with him. He was a great friend and confidant, even if his zeal was sometimes excessive.

— You should learn to read, Boukman always said, as I have. Then there’d be nothing to separate you from these whites. You are just as swift of mind.

— There’s nothing to separate me from them anyway, Toussaint replied. And I have no use for reading.

He was Master of Horse, and was allowed the freedom to live in his own cottage in comfort; he had shared it with his wife until her death from consumption. Before that he had been a shepherd, and he had been granted the liberty to wander the hills unsupervised with the sheep.
Why should I read? What happiness could it bring me?

Still, he had to admit that it would be pleasant to read the French books Boukman had told him about – Rousseau and Raynal and so on. Raynal, according to Boukman, said:

— Liberty is everyone’s property.

Raynal, too, predicted the coming of a negro king, a man who would liberate the slaves and submit the fertile lands of the new world to his furious vengeance. Boukman thought himself that king, Toussaint could tell.
A dangerous idea
, he thought, but he kept his tongue. Boukman could be fierce when aroused to anger, as when he’d first seen the silver cross around Toussaint’s neck.

— Why do you wear the Christ martyr on your person? he had asked. You, who have need only of the lwa of your people to protect you?

Toussaint had shrugged. His father had taught him to worship Christ and the one god, although he had told him that the lwa were real, too; Toussaint’s father was Arrada, from the lands where many of the vodou lwa had been born, yet he had learned the Bible from his master. Toussaint knew that many of the slaves carried with them icons of Mary to stand in for the lwa Erzili Danto. It allowed them to worship her; at the same time it let them conceal their true beliefs and pretend, in the eyes of the master, to practice a species of ignorant Christianity. In this way were not the two faiths coming together?

Toussaint hadn’t said any of this to Boukman, though. He had just shrugged and said that Christ was the one god, which he knew would irritate Boukman and put an end to the conversation.

In truth, he had inherited from his father a complicated attitude toward religion. He considered his father’s view – that all gods should be given their due, as being representative of the qualities people wished to nurture in themselves – to be largely correct.

It was also his father who had taught him the use of simples, which many Christians considered tantamount to witchcraft, and how to draw them from the growing things all around: sarsaparilla to cleanse the blood, catnip to calm babies, quassia to stimulate the nerves and to expel worms. Toussaint had healed his master more than once, and his children, and he had been repaid kindly.

All of this meant that Toussaint was both a Christian and a believer in the old ways. He might not want to utterly reject the gods of his ancestors, but, by the same token, why should he reject the Catholic faith his master had taught him, so beautiful and mystical in its dedication to the notion of a single divinity, and of which Pierre-Baptiste had spoken so eloquently?

This ceremony then, tonight, in the boggy land of Bois Caiman, was all Boukman’s doing. It was vodou superstition and Toussaint didn’t believe in it, but he came despite his battle with the contradiction. He had been lucky, he knew. He had seen the whip-scars on the backs of his fellow slaves, had seen children plucked from their mother’s breast and their necks broken. He had seen men killed for falling asleep on their feet. He himself was free, after a fashion, but he could see that his brethren were not. He believed in Boukman’s cause, even if he didn’t believe in the blessing Boukman insisted on applying to it.

— Tonight, Boukman shouted to the crowd that had gathered, we rise up! It is time for rebellion against the whites. The mulats demanded their freedom and the slavers repaid them with blood.

Two months earlier, the mulats had revolted against the whites. These mulats were the half-breeds; that is, the sons and daughters of white men and black women – for the opposite configuration was unthinkable. Mulats had more freedom than the blacks, but of a very limited kind. They weren’t chattel, but they weren’t citizens, either. They had tried to overthrow the whites, only to be brutally repressed. Their insurrection had been a crushing failure, but it had one lasting repercussion.

It had inspired the blacks.

— Now, shouted Boukman, the slavers will come to learn the real meaning of fear.

A general and wordless acclamation greeted this, people roaring and cheering.

— France declares the mulats, the bastard sons of slaver and slave, free! Yet what does France say of the negro slaves – mothers to those men of color – who grow her sugar, who prepare the indigo for her fine clothes? Nothing!

— Nothing!

Boukman gestured to the blind houngan beside him.

— Before we fight, we must join the spirits to our cause. We must be sure that the old gods are on our side, and the ancestors who, in turn, have become gods.

He gestured to the ground at his feet, and Toussaint looked down to see that there was a patch of earth darker than that surrounding it, an oblong patch about the length of a man.

Boukman picked up a spade that had been lying on the ground. Toussaint wondered why he hadn’t noticed it before, and was beginning to have a bad feeling.

— Two nights ago, said the houngan, one of our number bravely volunteered to be made a zombi.

Toussaint clenched his fists. He had heard about this practice; it was deep, dark vodou. A person would be given certain plants, the extract of a certain fish, and these would conspire to slow his heartbeat, his breathing, so that on cursory inspection he would appear dead. Toussaint could imagine what would happen when these ingredients were combined. Following this, the zombi would be buried and later exhumed to see the world anew. Toussaint had always thought the process a punishment. Why had the man – Toussaint shivered to acknowledge the possibility that there was a man buried under this dark patch of ground – chosen to be treated like this?

— The man under our feet is the first soldier in our war, said Boukman. He has died, and he will be reborn tonight. He has traveled to the land under the sea, where the dead live. He has been guided by Baron Samedi, the lwa of the cemetery, into death and he has caroused with our ancestors under the waves. He alone knows the disposition of the dead!

Ah
, thought Toussaint.
So the man is a kind of ambassador to the spirits of the ancestors, to the lwa
.
What a ridiculous farce, and how unpleasant, too.

Boukman bit down into the earth with the spade. It only took one scoop before he struck a wooden box. Quickly, he cleared the earth from it, then someone else stepped down to help him prise off the lid. Inside was a man who looked to be dead, only his skin didn’t have the pallor, nor his lips the blue tinge, that Toussaint had learned to associate with the truly departed.

Boukman guided the houngan’s blind fingers to find the man’s face. On doing so, he took a vial from his coat, unstoppered it, and, pulling open the mouth, poured a liquid down the throat of the apparent corpse.

With a great shudder, the man sat up in the box, coughing.

Pure drama, pure theater
, Toussaint thought.

But at that moment a cloud parted and the moon shone down, and he found himself trembling like any superstitious pagan.

Control yourself
, he thought.

— Tell us, Boukman said to the reanimated zombi. Tell us what you have seen, you who have been reborn this night.

Do the others know about the drugs?
Toussaint wondered.
I think not.
He thought they probably believed, really believed, that this man had died and had been reawakened by magic. He himself only knew the trick because his father had spoken of it, had warned of the power of the fish in question, warned him never to touch his store of its powder. No wonder the other spectators were staring, hanging on Boukman’s every word.

The man looked right through Boukman, right through the swamp, too, and his lips twitched.

— I saw Baron Samedi, he said, all bones with a suit over them. He took me under the waves, and I saw the swimming creatures and the ocean floor. And oh! I saw la Sirene. She was so beautiful with her fish’s tail, and she took me into her husband Agwe’s house, and in that house that is a country I saw all our dead departed.

— You saw our ancestors, asked Boukman, the ancestors of the slaves?

— Yes, even unto those whose bodies were left in Africa.

A hush had descended; people were craning closer to see. The script – for Toussaint assumed there must be a script and he further presumed that Boukman had written it – was melodramatic, but it was having its desired effect.

— And what did the ancestors say to you? asked the houngan.

— They said they would help us. They promised they would lend us their strength.

Boukman smiled. He clapped the man on the back, and a fresh bout of coughing began. Toussaint guessed the zombi must have got some earth in his throat when he was buried.

— We have the support of our ancestors, the gede lwa, the men who became gods when they died! said Boukman. We have the support of Baron Samedi, who is lord and gatekeeper of death. We have the support of la Sirene, who owns the sea that surrounds us and the house of the dead.

He paused.

— But there is one whose support we still require.

Another hush.

— Who?

And:

— Who?

And:

— Who?

The questions echoed in the clearing.

Boukman grinned.

He owns them more completely than if he had seized their balls in his hands
, Toussaint realized.

— We must call down Ogou Badagry, the lwa of war, said Boukman, and ask him into our met tet, into the seat of our souls. We must be possessed by war itself!

He looked around him, silent.

— YES!

Not an echo this time, but the whole crowd all together. Before he could stop himself, and to his shame, Toussaint answered, too.

— But Ogou will not possess us all! The man he chooses will be the one sent to free us.

More shouting from the assembly:

— You!