The Emerald Storm (23 page)

“Aim . . .”

I felt as picked out as a fly on a wedding cake.

“Now,” said Jubal. “Keep your paddle.” He jerked sideways, I followed suit, and with a splash we flipped over. As we went in I heard the final word.

“Fire!”

The water was pitch, and only by keeping my hand on the rim of the canoe did I remain oriented. I shoved my head up into its overturned wooden hull. As Jubal had promised, there was a pocket of air there. I couldn’t see him in the dark, but I could hear him blowing and breathing as he kicked.

Something scaly bumped my leg, and I jerked.

Then the world erupted. A projectile clipped our dugout, and it boomed like a drum. Other cannonballs plowed into the river all around us, smacking like beaver tails. I couldn’t see the splashes, but I could feel their concussion. There was the muffled screech of balls sailing by where we’d been sitting seconds before and thudding into the muddy riverbank beyond.

“That will keep Monsieur Caiman away, I hope,” Jubal said.

And indeed, the alligators had the good sense to flee.

I heard cheering through the wooden hull. Did the French think their barrage had overturned us? It must look so, and that we’d drowned or been eaten, since we didn’t reappear. The canoe would be very low in the dark. Jubal was swimming awkwardly, holding his paddle and the boat. I did my best to assist, as we slowly drifted east past the bonfires.

“I think we’re running out of air,” I said.

“Wait, like patient mice.”

“What if the caimans come back?”

“Then we feed them you so we don’t feed them me.”

“Merci
, Jubal.”

“You’re the one who wanted to go to the harbor.”

What followed was a little eternity of darkness, gasps in the stuffy air of the overturned canoe, occasional shots that I hoped were blind, and the queasy feeling of waiting for teeth to test my leg. I’d no idea if we were even going in the right direction, and the certainty that I’d once more lost wife and son made me almost not care. What a bloody fiasco.

I was wheezing. “Jubal, I need to go out for a breath.”

“A minute more.”

Then there was the drumlike thud of something striking our overturned canoe. We stopped abruptly. Had the French launched boats to pursue us? I could swim for the swamps to be shot or eaten, or surrender to be hung or burned.

Too tired to flee anymore, I decided.

“Surface,” Jubal said.

“To give up?”

“To be saved.”

I came up next to our craft. There was a great bright gouge in its top where a ball had hit, but otherwise it was remarkably intact; the hollowed log must be iron-hard. I blinked away water, seeing the white cross bands of uniforms in the dark, and opened my mouth, coughing, readying an apology for throwing a cleaver at the French commander.

But then I realized the faces looking down were all dark, and arms were reaching for us from a plank fishing boat.

“You’re rebels?”

Strong hands seized me. “Liberators.”

“It’s about time,” Jubal said.

“Maybe it’s you who are late,” the soldier replied. “Or maybe General Jean-Jacques Dessalines is angry that you went the opposite way of what he ordered.”

I sighed. “I’m afraid our route was my idea.”

“My companion is an idiot, Antoine,” Jubal said from the water beside me. “But perhaps a useful idiot.”

They hauled me aboard. “He don’t look useful,” a man with sergeant stripes said. “He looks drowned.” They laughed. Jubal flopped in next to me. The French bonfires had receded, the night protective.

“I have an urgent message for General Dessalines,” I said.

Antoine leaned close. “Then you can deliver it while he decides whether to kill you or cook you, white man.”

They laughed again, and I silently prayed the hilarity wouldn’t draw gunfire.

Chapter 25

J
ubal and I staggered exhausted from the rebel boat and collapsed to sleep on the bank of the river. We were hidden from view by mangrove trees and wakened at midmorning by heat and insects. Then we shared a breakfast of pork and plantain as we watched land crabs scuttle and caimans yawn. Our escort of a dozen blacks was as armed as a platoon of pirates with pistol, musket, and bayonet. Cane knives and machetes took the place of swords. A boy of ten perched in a tree, still as a cat, watching for French patrols.

“You like to cause trouble, white man,” said Antoine, a former field hand risen to full colonel. “Never have I heard so much shooting at one soggy head.”

“Two, if you count Jubal.”

“I think it was you they were aiming at, no?”

I conceded the point. “I am plagued by misunderstandings.”

“He acts with his heart instead of his head,” Jubal interpreted.

“You mean a woman,” Antoine guessed. “Cock instead of caution.” They laughed.

“Even worse,” said Jubal. “A wife.”

“Care instead of carefree!”

“I’m actually quite a careful planner, and my wife even more so,” I told them. “It’s just that the French in Cap-François are excitable.”

“So now you try the other side.”

“You do seem more relaxed.”

“That’s because we are winning.”

I was marched under rebel escort into the abandoned sugarcane fields, still limping from my sprain, my ear aching, my feet bare. The ground, thankfully, was the red soil of soft farmland. It was a relief to have lost my coat; I wondered why I’d worn it in the Caribbean as long as I had. The Negroes gave me another straw hat and a smear of ashes for my nose and ears, to protect against the sun.

Dirt lanes connecting the plantations led this way and that, but instead of grand colonial homes there were only hollow monuments to twelve years of slaughter. The land was humid and initially seemed deserted, but then we’d pass a clearing hacked in the cane and there’d be a platoon of black soldiers camped, dressed in a hodgepodge of captured French military dress, stolen planter fineries, and rags leftover from slavery. The men were lean, tough, and confident. One might puff a pipe, another sharpen a blade. They’d stop chatting and stare at me with suspicion as I trudged past, the lone white amid a squad of blacks. Was I prisoner or mercenary?

But studying them, I was now certain that Napoleon would never reinstate slavery on this island. The inhabitants had become independent not just in deed but in mind. It’s like trying to force a boy or girl coming of age back into childhood; it cannot be done.

“I can see why the French hesitate to fight you,” I said to Jubal.

“Some of these men have been at war all their adult lives,” he told me. “Most have lost brothers, mothers, wives. When we liberate a plantation, we share what is seized, but any money goes to buy arms from Yankee gunrunners. We have men with American rifles who can pick off French officers before they know they are being aimed at.”

“I once had a long rifle. I’m rather a good shot, actually.”

“We have all the shooters we need. Dessalines seeks thinkers.”

“You think, don’t you, Jubal?”

“Books became bread. It was a mistake by my master. I realized there were alternatives.”

“You’re the kind of man who reads and ponders, and thinks before he speaks. Most men in Paris and London can’t do that, you know.”

“Right now, I’m thinking how to make a case for you.”

Several miles from Cap-François we began to pass villages with huts of liberated black women and children. They’d already converted small sections of cane field to vegetable patches and animal pens. Chickens clucked, pigs grunted, and naked toddlers wandered, the latter reminding me of my missing son. How much would a three-year-old remember me after all these months? I could only pray he’d found succor with the return of his mother, and that she’d tell him good things about Papa.

How interesting if females ruled, instead of men with their dreams of martial glory! Less sorrow and more dullness, I guessed. More contentment and less inspiration. Not better or worse, necessarily, but different. An easier environment to sustain retirement.

A tropical wood topped the cane fields on a low hill too rocky and poor for agriculture. Within its shade was the main rebel camp. Instead of the closed tents of the French army, the blacks had stretched canvas awnings between the trees to create a network of pavilions that let through the breeze. The elevation put the headquarters at a deliberate distance from stagnant water, keeping mosquitoes at bay. Looted plantation tables and chairs provided outdoor furniture, and hammocks were strung for sleep. A haze of campfire smoke hung in the branches. I could smell roast pig and baking bread, and after our march I was as hungry as when I met Napoleon.

I didn’t get any food before this meeting, either.

The rebel army was not entirely the color of coal. Some were mulattos, and others white deserters. Poles who’d hoped service with France would spread revolution to their homeland instead found themselves hirelings in the sultry Caribbean. Most died immediately of yellow fever, but some survived to flee to the rebel army. Several had become drillmasters because the illiterate field hands responded almost automatically to white command, a habit ingrained since birth. I saw a company marching back and forth to a profane, shouted pidgin of French, African, and Polish.

I also saw children and grandmothers, fancy girls and cripples, craftsmen and cooks. There were dogs, cats, pet parrots, and braying donkeys. In one corner men were clustered around fighting cocks, cheering the birds on.

Dessalines’s headquarters was in the middle of this conglomeration of several thousand men and women, his pavilion roofed by what looked to be a liberated mainsail. Oriental carpets were spread on the ground. Huge black bodyguards ringed what seemed to be an open-air throne room, and the general presided on a red velvet settee that reminded me of the purple one in the office of Rochambeau. He glanced up from papers as I approached, frowning. I was pale, limping, unarmed, soiled, and barefoot. I didn’t look like much of a hero, or of much use, for that matter.

Jean-Jacques Dessalines, in contrast, exuded power and menace.

He was handsomer than L’Ouverture, a Negro of forty-five years, with high cheekbones, a firm chin, powerful torso, and the erect carriage of the French army officer he’d been. His sideburns extended into muttonchops, kinked hair cut close to his skull: in the heat, skin glistening, he looked as chiseled from black marble as a Roman statue of a Nubian lord. His gaze was predatory as an eagle. The general had set aside on the sofa a bicorn hat with ostrich plume, and wore an unbuttoned full military dress jacket with epaulettes and braiding. He was African chieftain crossed with military marshal, but his look of fierce intelligence exceeded either. Dessalines was reputed to be cruel, quick, and brilliantly determined.

Jubal had told me the general was made overseer as a young man because of his obvious cleverness, had been purchased by a free black named Dessalines, and had taken his Negro master’s name. When the slave uprising began in 1791, the opportunistic slave joined the revolt. Through courage, ruthlessness, and strength of personality, he became a key lieutenant to L’Ouverture. He followed Toussaint through a complex web of alliances and rifts with Spanish, British, French, and rival black armies, each side betraying the other again and again as the island’s tangle of ethnicities jockeyed for power. Dessalines was L’Ouverture’s fist, taking no prisoners and burning enemy homes to the ground. Just the year before, he’d heroically defended a fort against eighteen thousand French attackers, retreating only after an epic twenty-day siege. He then succeeded Toussaint when that general was betrayed in June of 1802. Now, in November of 1803, this general had squeezed the last whites into Cap-François. He met every atrocity the French could invent with cruelty of his own, and hanged, shot, burned, drowned, and tortured.

It was to this man that I’d fled for mercy and aid.

“We fished the American,” Antoine announced. “He decided to swim instead of walk. Jubal was good enough not to leave him for the caimans.”

“The reptiles spat him out,” my black friend said.

Dessalines studied me skeptically. “Is he useful?”

“He is famous,” said Jubal.

“That’s not the same thing.”

“And handsome!” called a black woman back in the crowd, leaning lazily against a tree. More people laughed, which I hoped was a good sign. I straightened, trying to look the part of resolute savant instead of desperate refugee. Maybe I could interest them in electricity, share some of Franklin’s aphorisms, or teach them a game of cards.

“Silence.” Dessalines held up his hand, and the laughter snuffed like an extinguished candle. He turned to me. “So you’ve come to the winning side.” His voice was low and sonorous.

“I believe we have common interests,” I replied with more confidence than I felt. “The United States wishes to see you victorious so that Napoleon will complete the transfer of Louisiana to my country. The British hope you will deprive their archenemy of Saint-Domingue, France’s richest colony. And the French are in pursuit of a legend they think will help them conquer the English. You’ve become not just the most important man in the land you call Haiti, General Dessalines, but one of the most important men in the world.”

I’d rehearsed this bit of flattery because I wasn’t certain how I’d be welcomed. Around me was Africa in all its dark power, and somehow I had to enlist help. His officers looked as skeptical and opportunistic as medieval earls. One whom I’d learn was named Cristophe was an imposing seven feet tall, while another named Capois tensed like a coiled spring. Even when resting, he seemed poised for attack. They were shrewd-looking, hard-muscled, swaggering men, with pistols in their sashes and tattoos on arms and faces. Some were as gaudily clothed as Dessalines, but one slim giant wore epaulettes on a cord slung around his neck so that his torso was bare in the heat. He displayed scars of an old whipping on his back.

They were still men like me, I reminded myself.
Savages we call them because their manners differ from ours
, old Ben Franklin had once observed.