Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [382]
I went to the last zombi, who had been, in his life, Chacha Godard. He moved away as I came near, moving a step for each step of mine, keeping our distance equal, as if an invisible stake was lashed between us. Perhaps it was so, for I had seen Chacha put into the ground, a corpse, and seen his body raised again, by Biassou, and made to move and to labor. I had wanted to see all those things at that time, but afterward there was nothing I could do to scrape the sight off my eyes.
Biassou had been gone for a long time now. He was supposed to have been killed in Florida. But still all this went on without him, and maybe it would take more than a handful of salt to undo it.
When Chacha struck the wall of the barracoon, he could not go backward anymore, and so I closed the distance. When I lifted my hand with the salt, his eyes rolled white, and his head whipped back and forth like the head of a panicked horse. He bit me when I forced the salt between his jaws, though not enough to break the skin. My hand jerked back, spilling salt upon the ground, but enough had passed his lips. His jaw worked and his body trembled. On the wet red of his lower lip, I saw the pieces of salt dissolving. Light came into his eyes then, and recognition, but no joy.
He turned from the wall, away from me, and began walking down toward the water. It was not the stiff zombi walk any longer. His hips and his shoulders swung with his step now, but still he walked very steadily, and his head and his eyes were fixed. Without breaking his pace, he passed the broken longboats on the shore and walked into the shallow surf, knee-deep, waist-deep, deeper. The sun was on the water, so bright one could hardly bear to look, and his head very black against it. A few people were quietly watching him, but many others were busy eating and drinking rum and so noticed nothing. Chacha kept walking into that bright mirror surface until the water sealed itself above his head.
At that moment a women on the beach was taken by Erzulie, and she began to sway and sing.
Tout kò-m se lò
Tout kò-m se lò
Tout kò-m se lò
Ezili sòti nan lamè-a
Tout kò-m se lò . . .
Erzulie of the Waters. People by the cookfire began to sway and clap their hands. They took up the singing too, though they had not seen what had begun it. They had not seen Chacha Godard go beneath the waters, but still they sang.
All my body is gold
All my body is gold
All my body is gold
Ezili comes out of the ocean
All my body is gold . . .
There was nothing to see in the ocean any longer, only the bright, tight surface of the water, like a sheet of hammered brass.
39
At a small mahogany secretary in his bedroom at the Governor’s Residence in Le Cap, Toussaint sat writing, alone for once. He wrote in his own hand, for the matter was unsuitable for dictation. The high arched wooden doors had been opened onto the balcony by the servant who had brought in his coffee, so that daylight illuminated his hand and his page. It was early in the morning, still cool, and a small moist breeze moved through the garden.
“My dear sons, Placide and Isaac,” he wrote, “I salute you from the country of your birth, your nation—” He stopped and blotted out the last phrase, “your nation,” so heavily it was in no way legible. “May this letter find you healthy and industrious in the bosom of our great Republic, France.”
He dipped his pen and lifted it from the well, tilting the nib for the excess to run off. Abstractedly he looked out over the balcony rail. In the sun-gilded garden, a servant was slowly sweeping up dried curls of leaves that had been blown down from the trees in the night.
“I wish always that both of you should make good use of the opportunity I must still deny myself, to live among the deepest roots of our fatherland, which is France.” This statement was flawless, from the point of the view of the censors and spies who