Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [381]
Then the ship did fire a cannon, and we answered quickly from the beach, but our shot miscarried. Couachy, on the heights above, was the better gunner, and he managed to drop a ball from the cliffs onto the ship’s deck. The ship’s cannon fired another time, but without hitting anything that mattered. Then the ship loosed its moorings and sailed away without doing anything more.
It was over, except the zombi-master was hemmed up in a corner of the rice field, with the zombis gathered tightly around him. Guiaou’s men were keeping well back, because they were all afraid of the zombis, and none more than Guaiou. The zombi-master was a blackman like us, and I knew him from the camps of Biassou, from long before I went to Bahoruco, though I did not care to remember his name. He was wearing a Spanish uniform still, with many ribbons and coins pinned over the front of it. I think he knew me also, for he seemed about to say my name, but I shot him twice, a pistol in each hand, and he fell over backward into the swamp.
Let the crabs take him. I loaded my pistols and put them in my belt. Now the zombis were all moving aimlessly around like ants do when one has kicked over the hill. Everything rushed up at me, swooping as in my dream, this zombi farm and the barracoon and the slave ship still waiting on the beach and the men in the tobacco who scarcely cared if they were free and Moyse’s death bound soon to come and all the people across the border working quietly, tightly, under Toussaint’s order. All this at once, and the same voice in my ear, but now the words were different.
What they did to us, we have learned to do to ourselves.
Where would it end? There could be no end. I saw this plainly at that moment, but I had always in my pocket the bag of salt I had gathered from the pans below Gonaives.
All my men were hanging back, afraid of the zombis still. The people freed from the barracoon were afraid of them too. I saw this had been the way of the zombi-master, using this fear to keep them down. All those people had been captured near the border, one at a time or in little groups, when they strayed too far from their villages, in the direction of the Rivière Massacre. They were mostly women, and children of all ages. Some of the older boys had taken up the guns of the dead whitemen.
It was true that the zombis looked frightening. There were thirteen of them, naked except for a cloth at the waist. They were starved to skin and bone and the cords that strung the bones together, and their eyes were more empty than the eyes of animals, like the eyes of that blanche I had seen in my dream.
I took some salt into my hand and went to the nearest zombi, holding him by his upper arm. He understood nothing, and I had to rub the grains against his mouth. But when he had once tasted it, a thread of life came into his eyes, and the stiffness began to leave his body, and he pushed at me for more. Then they were all pressing up around me, pushing, nuzzling, spilling the mound of yellow salt from my two cupped hands, their lips heavy and loose as the lips of horses.
All but one.
The people, my soldiers and those from the barracoon, were all looking upon Riau as if he were BonDyé himself. As they awoke, the zombis began to mingle with the people we had freed. They were given clothes from the dead men. It seemed that some of them were recognized from lives they’d lived before they were brought here to be among the dead. Some of the freed women from the barracoon had opened the supplies of the slave traders and were beginning to cook food.