Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [104]
Marie-Noelle had prepared griot of pork with rice and beans and a few stewed greens, but she remained outdoors beside her fire, while Moustique served the table. He was not invited to sit down, but caught snatches of the conversation as he passed the plates and refreshed the rum and water the company drank in place of wine. Most of the talk concerned the war. Toussaint had been battering Saint Marc since midsummer, and without success, but he had defeated the English almost everywhere else he had met them, at Marchand and Pont l’Ester and Verrettes. From this last position he had quickly turned to drive the Spanish from Petite Rivière. The sheer speed of his maneuvering was remarkable, all agreed.
Toussaint was certainly a man of cunning, said the oldest man at the table, fondling his peppery beard as he spoke. Perhaps even a man of genuine talent—but no one could prevail indefinitely against European soldiers. A marabou youth across the table hotly rejoined that no campaign of the British General Brisbane had managed to dislodge Toussaint from the Cordon de l’Ouest.
“So for the moment he remains our master,” said the bearded man, “for better or for worse,” and someone noted that every plantation and settlement in the mountains was much calmer since Toussaint had established his chain of posts from Gonaives to the heights above Mirebalais, and someone else complained that his cultivators (he just stopped short of saying slaves) grew restless in the proximity of so many black soldiers, and many ran away to join Toussaint’s army . . .
At the head of the table, Delahaye listened, silently attentive, his fingertips unconsciously worrying a whorl in his close-cropped gray hair, until he noticed Moustique lingering, and gestured at the empty pork platter.
Moustique went outside to the fire. The sky was darkening, slate-blue, the wind shivered the high palms, and crows flew crying among them. In the nearest bitasyon above the town, there was a quick, sharp rattle of drums, trailing off, then beginning again. Marie-Noelle refilled the pork platter from the iron kettle, her eyes lowered, almost demure. She was usually quiet, Moustique remembered, when apart from the pack of other girls; still something in her manner seemed to have changed.
When he went back with the dish of pork, the young marabou was loudly declaring that Toussaint had a better hope than anyone of driving all the white people from the island once for all. One of the older men pointed out that such a result would hardly be in their own interests—practically all of them had relatives who were collaborating with the British at Port-au-Prince and points farther south.
“Yes,” the bearded man agreed, “and equally you must not forget that Toussaint has sold himself to the French, to Laveaux—”
“Laveaux is a good man,” Delahaye put in.
“Laveaux is the tool of Sonthonax,” the bearded man said, “who would set the most ignorant, savage Africans above us—”
“Sonthonax has left the country,” the young marabou snapped.
“So he has,” the bearded man said, leaning forward as he lowered his voice, “and on the eve of his departure he gave his commissioner’s medallion, along with its powers and prerogatives as I have heard, to Dieudonné, who is no more and no less than a wild maroon from the mountains. And he told him—as you may not know—Sonthonax told Dieudonné, So long as you see mulattoes in your ranks you will never be free.
A considerable silence followed, during which Delahaye noticed Moustique again and sent him out for more rum and a plate of cut fruit. When he returned, the young marabou was in the midst of a hot reply to some resumed thread of the conversation: “—and what of Rigaud, who is of our race, and of the French Republican party? What of Beauvais, who is one of us too, and undoubtedly a man of honor?”
“I do not see that either of those men has thrown in his lot with Toussaint.” The bearded griffe leaned forward, raising