Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [92]
Those words were heard before in Bahoruco. Maît’ Kalfou had not been the first to bring them here. The words of Toussaint’s letter had come from both sides of the border, from the whitemen of France and the whitemen of Spain, and on the same day that the French Commissioner Sonthonax declared that all the slaves were free. Toussaint had signed his letter Toussaint Louverture, a name that he had never used before that time, when everyone had called him Toussaint Bréda, from the name of the habitation where he had been a slave.
I had not thought much of Toussaint’s words when they first came to us, though I saw that he was trying still to use words to sway men at long distances (as Riau had helped him to do, before Bahoruco), sending the words that walked on paper as his messengers, teaching them to speak with the voices of others. But the name . . . he had invented it, so much was sure, unless it was given to him by his mystère, but Toussaint always claimed that he served only Jesus, not the loa, and no one had ever seen a spirit mount his head. After Kalfou had let Riau’s flesh drop in the wind-fallen leaves beside the sacred pool, the understanding came to me, that in calling himself Toussaint of the Opening he meant to say it was Legba working through his hands.
But sometimes it is Maît’ Kalfou who comes . . .
“Go to the cacique,” Jean-Pic said, when I had spoken part of the thought to him. And I got up from the leaves and drank water from a spring nearby, and touched cold water to my face and the back of my head. Jean-Pic and I shared a mango he had picked. We went down toward the cave mouth where the cacique was, but the way there was not straight. Below where we walked the bitasyon spread among the folds of mountain in and out of sight, the square cays built of mud and stick and sometimes fenced with cactus thorn, the corn plantings twisting to follow veins of good earth among rock ledges on the slopes. The path twisted the same way between the corn and the yards of the mud-walled houses. All down the mountain the cocks were crowing and people waking to the day, stepping out upon their packed-earth yards. Farther down the gorges were the palisades of sharpened poles and the mantraps dug and hidden for attackers to fall into, or for anyone. Riau, I myself, might have been so taken, only that I came here with Jean-Pic who knew where the mantraps were dug. Under Santiago the maroons of Bahoruco had promised with the French whitemen to return escaping slaves for a reward of gold, but now Santiago was dead and by the words of Sonthonax there were no more slaves in the land, but still the maroons of Bahoruco mistrusted the coming of any stranger from outside.
The little crook-jawed pin-tooth dogs scampered and turned behind their cactus fences as we passed, but they did not bark or growl because they knew our smell. It was those dogs that gave the warning when the whitemen came, or anyone outside the bitasyon. Outside one cay a young woman looked up from where she was pounding dried corn into meal to smile at us both as we went by, but there were few women here, and the men were not so many as the whitemen believed they were. They told, when Santiago went to make the peace paper with the French whitemen, he brought one hundred thirty-seven grains of corn to show the number of the people, but that was trickery, there were more. Though not the thousands the whitemen believed, there were some hundreds there.
We walked the twistings of the path, worn deep in rocky earth by people walking, with a stream twisting beside it, lower down, until we turned the point of the ledge and came to the cave opening where the cacique was. Bahoruco