Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [91]
Toussaint, meanwhile, was busy fighting a war on two fronts. Along the interior border, significant Spanish forces (mostly composed of black auxiliaries) remained to be dealt with. These troops, under the command of Toussaint’s erstwhile superiors Jean-François and Biassou, were less well organized and well trained than Toussaint’s own men, who were usually successful against them. At the same time, Toussaint’s army made repeated but unsuccessful attempts to dislodge the British from Saint Marc and fought numerous engagements in the region of the Artibonite River, the next significant natural boundary south of the mountains of the Cordon de l’Ouest. These areas remained in dispute, but from Dondon in the interior across the mountains to Gonaives, Toussaint—and thus the French Republic—was impregnable.
10
Papa Legba, we were singing, Attibon Legba, ouvri baryè pou nou . . . We sang, and Bouquart, the big Congo maroon with the cross-shaped marks of his people in Guinée paired on his stomach, struck the Asoto tambou, there at the center of the batterie of three drums. He touched the Asoto drum with his left hand and a small stick crooked like a hammer in his right. Papa Legba, open the gate for us . . . It was Bahoruco Mountain where we danced, on a height above the mouth of one of the great caves, and when the drums played, the cave spoke too in a drum’s voice. The drums called Legba to open the crossroads, let the loa come up from the Island Below Sea into our heads, and I, Riau, was singing too for Legba, not hearing my own voice any more than I felt the salt water gathering on my face. We call for blessed Legba to come, but sometimes it is Maît’ Kalfou who brings himself to the crossroads, the trickster, betrayer sometimes, magouyé.
Singing still, I watched Bouquart, his face sweat-shining, with a motionless grin gleaming as he drummed. The fleur-de-lys was branded on his left cheek, to punish him for running away, and for another such punishment his right ear had been lopped off, and for the same reason he wore on each leg a nabot the size and weight of a cannonball, welded around his ankles, and yet he had still run as far and fast as Bahoruco. If there had been a forge, I, Riau, might have struck the nabots off his feet, using the powers of fire and iron (for that Riau who was a slave had learned blacksmithing from Toussaint), and equally the power of my maît’ têt, Ogûn-Feraille, but there was no forge at Bahoruco, only the voices, the drums, the low droning out of the caves, then silence with hands fluttering on the drum skins light and soundless as the wings of birds, their gray and white feathers shivering, and the scream that came from Riau’s body, stripped the body from the mind, as the god came up from beneath the waters, through heels and spine to flower in his head.
It was not Ogûn who came, they told me after, not the proper master of my head, but Maît’ Kalfou who took my body for his horse, though never before had that one mounted Riau. Jean-Pic told me it was so, when Riau came to himself again at dawn, the cool mist rising round him at the edge of the sacred pool. It was quiet then, the birds speaking softly, hidden in the leaves, and only a drum’s echo beating slowly somewhere behind my head. Maît’ Kalfou, Jean-Pic told me, had walked among the dancers, his arms raised in the shape of the cross and his muscles trembling from their own strength, and had spoken in his wet, croaking voice, but Kalfou’s words belonged to the proclamation of Toussaint from Camp Turel.
My name is perhaps not unknown to you. But Maît’ Kalfou