Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [89]
“So then you came to Louisiana,” Kelley prompted.
I’m going backward. His eyes still heavily lidded, Henri rocked slightly from the waist.
“The blood, then,” Kelley said. “This blood of yours that scared your black King so.”
Ah. Henri rocked in place. His eyes popped open. Yes. There is always something more behind the thing you see. There is for example Dessalines. Who spilled the blood of every white person he could catch. Hundreds. Thousands. At Jérémie a river of blood five feet across dried up and stayed until the summer rains. The nègres of that zone walked miles out of their way so that they would not have to cross it. But the blood of Dessalines is not my blood. No. I have the blood that made the first rising and sent the white men screaming into the sea. From the man without whom Dessalines would be nothing. Sé fils Toussaint Louvti mwen yé.
“Toussaint Louverture?” Kelley said. “You’re the son of Toussaint Louverture?”
Henri did not appear to hear him.
Et deye sa? Et deye sa? There’s always another thing behind the thing you see. Behind Toussaint is Gaou-Ginou, and all the kings in Dahomey since the jaguar spirit made Arada and flew up into the night sky on his burning wings.
“Stop it,” Little cried, as if in pain. “Stop all that wild nigger jabber. It’s nothing but superstition and savagery anyhow.”
Listen, Henri said furiously. There’s something else behind the jaguar too. When God made the first man he was black as the night with no stars in it. You people got that sick color of yours from a sorcerer’s curse or some kind of disease. From hiding in caves for five or ten centuries because you don’t have the spirit to stand in the sun. I’d like to see you call God’s first man a nigger.
“I don’t see that man here,” said Little, bristling.
“No you don’t.” Henri said wearily. “You don’t see a damn thing.”
Little subsided and raised a placating hand. “Henry,” he said. “I don’t mean you any offense.”
“Dear God,” Henri said. “I believe you might be fool enough to actually mean what you just said.”
Little opened his mouth but said nothing. He turned his head to spit to the back side of the log where he was sitting, and did not raise his eyes again.
“Let me see if I’m folleren you right,” Nath Boone said. “You come here because you want rile up our niggers to kill all the white folks?”
“You could put it that way. It’s a shame they won’t do it. Things don’t always work out like you plan.” Henri looked in the fire for a minute, then back to Boone. “On the other hand, you’re doing a really nice job of killing each other.”
He fell silent. The old language hummed in his head. Going backward had a gravity to it. You fell into that and kept falling. He thought of the giddy surge of black men rising. How it should have been that way for John Brown but was not. Should have been that way for himself but was not. At most of the plantations he had visited the slaves looked at him like he was some dark spirit come to steal their souls. Some did rise to his suggestion, but only a very few—young men, or hotheaded boys really, without attachments or the full knowledge of fear. There were many more willing to run than to fight. The memory of Africa had been bred right out of them.
Still, he was looking across the clearing into Matthew’s eyes, which burned yellowish like a cat’s in the dark. In the space behind those eyes at least, the flame of Henri’s thought found fuel.
Jerry then unveiled his skillet and a warm full baking smell embraced the men. Within the circle of the iron the biscuits, airy and golden, seemed to float.
“Thank God,” Kelley said, and surreptitiously wiped saliva from the corner of his mouth. No one said any more of a blessing than that. But when Jerry reached into his poke and drew out a pat of butter wrapped in damp leaves a sigh went round the group. When a honeycomb in a cracked white bowl appeared, that sigh became a