Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [378]
Moyse put the General Pageot in charge of the town, and we went on to join Paul Louverture at Santo Domingo City. Toussaint had crossed the border himself by then, and he was moving more men along the way his brother had opened. They had not much fighting to do on those roads either. It seemed there were not many people east of the mountains at all, neither whitemen nor their slaves. Nothing was there but cattle where we passed following Moyse, or horses and mules running half wild, and once in a long way a single herdsman’s hut standing by a corral. In the towns there were more people, but they were not meaning to give any fight.
At Santo Domingo City, the Spanish General Don García made his surrender to Toussaint without any trouble. Anyway it had all been settled before by a peace paper between white people across the sea. So there was no reason for a battle. It must have been sweet for Toussaint to beat Don García so easily. All the time that Toussaint had been fighting for the Spanish, Don García had set Jean-François and Biassou above him. Now those two had disappeared, and Toussaint stood above the man who’d been their master, though it was in the name of France. Still, all of us who came with Moyse had seen Roume in that chicken house.
Toussaint ordered that there would be no vengeance taken on the Spanish people, the same as he had said about the mulattoes at Les Cayes. Here in Santo Domingo, the order was respected. I noticed this very much and I saw that Moyse had noticed it too.
It had been long, a very long time, since my spirit had mounted on my head. I had not gone to the drums after the false rising Moyse had begun to frighten Roume. There was no bamboche nor any drums after the Spanish gave up their country at Santo Domingo City. Toussaint would not allow it. It must be all quiet and strict discipline, as in the whitemen’s army. All this time I had been alone with myself, Riau, thinking in ticks like that officer’s watch which I kept always tightly wound in my pocket. This was loneliness. When I slept, I was wrapped in the dark, and no part of me traveled away into dream.
After the Spanish had surrendered, Toussaint told Moyse to divide his men in small patrols and send them around the northeast part to root out any Spanish soldiers who might not know of the surrender. I was to lead one such patrol myself, at the head of my twenty men.
This news lightened the weight I had been feeling on me for a long time then. The night before we set out on this errand, I dreamed. My ti-bon-ange was flying like a hawk among high mountains, with such swoops and sharp descents that my heart was many times swollen with fear. Those mountains were high and jagged and wrinkled like the mountains of Saint Domingue, but no trees were on their peaks, only mounds of snow and edges of ice. The sky was cold blue and there was no cloud, no sign of rain, and the cold was like the death when all the blood stops running in your body. In the life of my flesh I never had seen snow nor ice, though I had heard of these things from the whitemen. In my dream it struck me that the whitemen carried the seeds of this ice somewhere inside them, wherever else they went in the world, and the cold stabbed out through the blue of their eyes.
On the cold, cliff side was a sacrifice to Baron, bones hanging in chains against the stone. These were bones of a man, I saw, when my ti-bon-ange swooped near. Across a deep frozen gorge from the bones was a whiteman’s fort built on a peak, with all the roofs and walls piled up with snow. The voice of Toussaint was in my ears, though Toussaint was nowhere to be seen. Is it not to cut off a