Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [88]
Nath Boone raised his head to Henri. “Was you to Kansas with the Browns?” he said.
“No,” Henri said. “Not Kansas.”
“So, then?” Boone said.
“So then before,” Henri said. “I’m going backward, am I not? There’s always something behind the thing you saw before.”
All present then watched reverently as Jerry laid rounds of dough on the floor of his skillet and scraped up coals to cover the lid. All save Jeffrey Forrest, who continued to dance with the shade of his belle.
New Orleans, Henri said. La Louisiane. I came to Louisville from there and I came from there to Harpers Ferry before that. I meant to raise black men along the way both times. Raise them to fight their way free of slavery. But most of them, they wouldn’t be raised.
“Niggers,” Little said. “What do you expect?”
“Mr. Little,” Henri said. “There’s times I’d like to thread a meat hook through your tongue and hang you from it.”
Little stared at him balefully, his jaws clenched tight.
“Don’t think it’s never happened,” Henri said. “I’ve seen it done to nice little white men very much the same as yourself. You wouldn’t believe how much tongue you’ve got, once it all pulls out. You can’t see how it ever fit in your head in the first place.”
“Let up, Monty,” Nath Boone said. “You don’t quit rubben the man the wrong way, he won’t never get this story told.”
Mister Little has a point. This country did teach me something I’d have never thought before. There is such a thing as nigger after all. Something a little less than a man. Born a slave. Dies a slave. Being a slave is built into him. I’ll leave you white gentlemen to consider who it was did that building.
Henri stopped speaking because he could feel Matthew’s eyes boring into him, from where the boy sat with his long legs folded like a grasshopper.
I don’t mean you. I don’t mean me. Nor Denmark Vesey nor Nat Turner nor Gabriel Prosser nor Charles Deslandes. There are black men in this country who walk with a warrior spirit. But just some is not enough. It needs to be all and so far it’s not. Not one time when I went up and down the Mississippi River. They won’t rise. Not yet they won’t.
“I’d admire to see New Orleans,” Nath Boone said. “My uncle went there oncet on a flatboat. ’Course after that he had to walk back.”
La Louisiane. It was safe for me there. In a manner of speaking. I speak the languages. Spanish and French and the old tongue too. There’s not so much a mystery about what I am in that place. I’ll tell you what, Mathieu mon cher, down in La Nouvelle Orléans you’d be a man of color. Up here they count me as a nigger just like you.
Henri stopped, or was stopped, rather, by the bitterness he heard in his own laughter. He’d meant to take a straight line backward, but his story was beginning to slip sideways. Nath Boone called him back.
“You ain’t from Loosiana either in the first place, is that right?”
No. I come from Ayiti.
“Well, I never heard of any such a place—” Little began, but it was Kelley who stopped him this time.
“He means Haiti,” Kelley said. “The Black Republic.”
“What do you mean the Black Republic?” Little said. “That don’t make no sense.”
“It means the niggers are in charge,” Kelley said. “They run the plantations. They run the government. They run the whole country. They speak French too! The bottom rail’s on top is what that means.”
“I don’t understand you,” Little said. “What happened to the white folks, then?”
“They died,” Henri told him.
“That can’t be,” Little said. “Niggers running everything. It ain’t right. It ain’t natural. I don’t see how God could allow it.”
“I don’t see how God allows you,” Henri said. “As a matter of fact you’ve been disallowed already and just don’t know it yet.”
“But,” Kelley said, “why didn’t you stay in Haiti? I mean, I don’t understand why you would leave there and come over here to fight with Nathan Bedford Forrest for the Confederacy.”
“It’s a fair question,” Henri said. “I’ll admit that wasn’t exactly my plan.”
“Y’all hush,” said Nath Boone. “Let the man tell it.”
In Haiti is an emperor, a black man