Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [379]
Is it not to bury a man alive?
Toussaint’s voice was still at my ear, so gentle it seemed I could not bear it. My dream sucked up into the cold sky, in a spiral like the flight of the malfini, until the world below was no more than a smudge.
When I woke, the watch had stopped, and I did not rewind it. My spirit was more clear than it had been for a long time, and it seemed to me that I knew the future. Or better, that there was no future, nor yet any past, but everything was already happening in the way that was to come. When I saluted Moyse at our parting, I saw his death and the part Riau must play in it. Moyse had been one-eyed for a long time now, and he was very near, that day, the place where he was bound to go. No power could change this for him, but on that morning even my sadness was as clear as glass. We rode up to the north, toward the coast and Puerto del Plata.
Old silver mines were in the mountains there, but these had long been abandoned. The mine holes were full of the bones of the Tainos whom the Spanish had made to work until they died. Farther on we met a squad of Spanish soldiers who stood ready to fight. They fired on us, but I, Riau, sat my horse unmoving, like Halaou with his bull’s tail or his white cock in his arms, and the bullets bent their paths to go around me. The Spanish broke and ran away, pursued by their own fear. We did not trouble to chase them down and kill them.
On the third day we came to a small plantation in the hill where they were growing tobacco. There were slaves there still, with only a few white people over them. Just one family of blancs lived there, the father and two sons and the wife and abuelita both dressed in Spanish black. We let this head blanc know that France had taken his part of the island and so slavery was finished there now. The black people who were in our hearing did not seem very excited by this news, though they looked curiously at our horses and our weapons, and some of the young women gave us shy and secret smiles.
I thought maybe these people did not understand our language, so I told the head blanc he must repeat the words in Spanish. It seemed to me that he did so truly, though I did not have so very much Spanish in my head myself. Still there was no great movement among the black people when he spoke. I told the blanc we must bring the news to the others who were in the fields, and this we did. There were not so many slaves on this habitation anyway, something less than thirty men, sixty altogether with the women and the children.
At the drying shed we found the smuggler Tocquet, with Gros-jean and Bazau, and one of the white sons who was helping them to load their donkeys with leaf tobacco. Tocquet saluted me, with his cayman smile, and I took his hand. I was glad enough to see him, and especially Gros-jean and Bazau. As if they were marrons themselves, those three had never paid much attention to the border.
The head blanc spoke to the workers in Spanish with the words that I had given him to say. When he had finished, the slaves shrugged at each other and went to sit down on felled logs outside the shed. They smiled and muttered among themselves, but it did not appear that any great change had fallen upon them. They looked like they might go back to the same work once they had rested for a while.
Because I knew he understood Spanish better than I, I asked Bazau if the blanc had spoken truly. Bazau answered that he had.
Then I did not know