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By Root 1154 0

and did not want to do it. Better to have been killed in the middle of one of the big fights I had been in with Halaou, or Boukman even, long before. The storeroom had been used for coffee, and there was still the smell of coffee there, but it was empty, only bare shelves and hooks with nothing hanging from them, and no one brought any food or water. Rats were gnawing and walking down under the wood floor, and outside the door the guard sometimes coughed or thumped his musket stock on the sill. I wondered about Merbillay’s other man, who had probably come to Dondon with the rest of Toussaint’s soldiers, if he was still alive. It was funny to think that we might pass each other or speak to each other without knowing it. He might even be the man standing guard outside the storeroom, or the man who would be ordered to shoot Riau, whenever Toussaint ordered it.

I felt sad then because I remembered I would not see Merbillay or Caco anymore when I was dead, but there was nothing I could do to change what was going to happen. I heard the watch ticking in the coat pocket and I took it out to look. The metal point moved in little jerks around the circle. It seemed terrible for time to be shut up in the watch, the way Riau was shut into the storeroom. Whitemen appeared to live that way always, jerking with the pointer. Then I knew what it was I must do, to try to keep living after all, so I banged on the door and called out in my Captain’s ordering voice that they must bring me pen and paper.

At first, they did not answer me on the other side, but I kept shouting, with silences in between the shouts. Each time the long point of the watch had traveled a quarter of the circle, I would begin to shout again. At last I heard the voice of Moyse beyond the door, and though I could not see him when the door opened, out of the ring of bayonets and gun barrels, hands appeared to pass me pen and paper and ink, and a stub of candle too, because there was no light for writing in the storeroom.

I took a shelf board down from the wall and sat with it balanced on my knees, to hold the paper. The words had been made already in my head, but I wrote them very slowly in the handwriting I had learned to copy from that dead Frenchman’s letters, careful to think just how each word must be drawn on the sheet of paper.

To General Toussaint Louverture

from his Captain, Riau

My General it is true that for desertion the punishment is Death. Your Captain Riau does not have fear to Die. But a Dead Man cannot serve his People and I have come back of my free will to serve. I pray you let my life and my death also if it be on a field of battle serve my people and their Cause.

I am your servant

Captain Riau

When the letter was finished and the ink was dry, I folded it two times and dripped candlewax to hold it shut and wrote Toussaint’s name on the other side. Then I beat on the door until someone grunted on the other side, and I slipped the letter through the crack beneath the door. Outside it was night, or must have been. When I pinched the candle out, there was no light at all and I lay on the floorboards and slept like I had been shot already.

They came for me with muskets and bayonets, and Moyse was not there nor anyone I knew, so I thought I would be shot anyway, maybe. It was just dawn, with the mist rising from the square before the church. I would go beneath the waters maybe without meeting Toussaint again, I thought, but then I saw him sitting beneath the canvas where Moyse had been before.

Toussaint wore his yellow mouchwa têt like always and his general’s hat was on the table beside the letter of Captain Riau. Now he wore the French uniform, and he had a big red plume above the white feathers in his hat, but everything else about him was the same as it had been. Riau’s thumbprint in the wax seal of the letter had been broken all the way across, and when I saw that I felt fear, as if Riau’s head would be taken from his body after all, his feet torn off the earth forever.

“You do credit to your tutors,” Toussaint said at last, with a tick