Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [380]
I thought, as we rode, that it was not all for nothing. At my left side was Bienvenu, whom I had set free from the headstall when he ran away from Habitation Arnaud before the rising. At my right side was Bouquart, whom I had freed from his nabots. And in the rear was always Guiaou, and it could be understood that Riau and Guiaou had each made the other more free than either one had been before.
At dusk we came to the last hills above a narrow plain which ran flat to the sea. This plain was a small, tight pocket with two mountain ranges between it and Fort Dauphin. I had heard that it was here, but never before seen it. We stopped, under cover of the trees. A ship was at anchor off the beach, and it seemed some sailors were camped on the shore. Nearer the mountains were clay houses, and the small green squares of rice fields, and the long, low shape of a barracoon. When the wind blew from the sea, we caught the sour smell of the people shut up there.
I kept my men well hidden under the trees, but later, long after darkness, when the fires in the camp had burned low, I slipped down with Bienvenu to look. About two dozen men were there, whitemen of the lowest type and a few blacks and mulattoes. The sailors in the beach camp made ten more. One could not tell how many were closed in that barracoon, and there were also some other slaves who were not shut up there, but were working in the rice. There was one small brass cannon covering the trail which led into the mountains to the west, and another one on the beach. The first cannon was watched by two men, but both were sleeping, and Bienvenu wanted to kill them then and there. This we could have easily done. I, Riau, had slipped into whitemen’s camps by night, with Dessalines himself, and Moyse and some others, to do this work with knives. But tonight I did not want to do it. If the watch was changed before morning, the whole camp would take alarm.
We crossed a mud dike of the rizières to get back into the mountains. Those other slaves were standing on the dikes around us, unmoving, white-eyed, still as egrets standing in a swamp or horses sleeping on their feet in the field. They did not need to sleep like ordinary people, because they were already dead.
The hair was walking by itself on my neck and my arms when we passed among them, and this feeling in me reached out to greet the same feeling in Bienvenu. Zombi. It was true. Biassou had kept this place for a long time before he left the country, and it was said that Jean-François also had used to sell slaves from the island, and still the same thing was always going on. Riau had heard of it for a long time, and knew more of it than he was willing to remember.
The sureness of my dream came back to me, but at the same time I needed to think and to plan as Toussaint would have done it. Four parties of five men each. Bienvenu would take his men to seize that cannon in the mountains and move it quickly to the cliffs above the sea. Bouquart and his men would break into the barracoon. Guiaou would lead a charge on horseback across the dike of the rizières. I, Riau, and my five men would handle the boats and the camp on the beach.
We moved an hour before full dawn, just as the light was turning blue. On the beach I waited for the shot that meant Bienvenu had got the cannon. It was easy enough to kill the blancs on the beach as they struggled up from their sleep, but the most important thing was to smash in the three longboats drawn up there and aim the cannon at the ship. I did not know how many men might be on that ship, or if there were more boats or cannon there.
The whitemen inshore had jumped up to meet Guiaou coming across the rice field and now they were being cut down by swords from