Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [94]
Both packages of letters had been sent to the gérant, a whiteman sent out of France to manage the plantation. Those tied with string were from the owners of that habitation, who lived in France but wrote mostly complaining to their gérant, that too much of money was spent, too small of harvests returned, that the slaves cost too much in money and would not work long or hard enough, that they cost too much in food, and too many ran away to the mountains. The last of those letters, written after the slaves had risen in the north, complained more bitterly of the disasters. But the letters tied with ribbon were sweeter to the taste of eye and mind—they came from two whitewomen of France, the gérant’s mother and another who sent words of love to him although she did not have his child. BonDyé had not joined these two together before Jesus, but it seemed they wished it, though now the ocean was between them. Those letters spoke words of love to the gérant, and went on whispering his name whenever I opened them, though the gérant had been dead since that night we had all come to that Cul de Sac plantation with Halaou, and when I copied the words they spoke again. Sometimes I thought of writing such a letter of Merbillay, who had my child—make the love words speak to her from paper. I could write my son to Caco, how the letters of the gérant’s mother always began—my dear son. But I did not know if Merbillay was still with Toussaint’s camp wherever it had moved to, or if she had gone somewhere else, but wherever she was, she could not read and had never thought of learning.
This day I wrote nothing, copied no word, but sat with my arms wrapped around my knees, looking across the candle flame at the glitter of the watch and the metal pieces on the pistols. In learning to use such tools as these, Riau might enter the mind of a whiteman. Of Toussaint and Sonthonax, which was the greater magouyé?
With Toussaint’s army Riau was an officer of the rank of captain, wearing boots and a sash and cartridge box, with power to order lesser soldiers how to fight, but when he felt too much like a horse in harness, he stripped off those officer clothes and ran with Jean-Pic to Bahoruco. There we heard that Halaou, who was both warrior and hûngan, as Boukman had been in the first rising in the north, was killing whitemen on the plain of Cul de Sac. Then I, Riau, I went to see this Halaou with my own eyes—ten thousands of men followed him then, all slaves risen from the habitations, so one more was not noticed. Halaou kept his camps across the Spanish border, some way north of Bahoruco, but would come out from his camps to kill whitemen on the plain, or fight against the grand blanc Frenchmen who had joined the English of Jamaica to make us slaves again. Halaou was a big man, and he went to the fighting like a possédé, and at the ceremonies strong spirits stormed around his head, but at other times he went quietly, so that he was not much noticed, and he always carried in his arms a white cock, tenderly as one carries a baby. In the cluckings of the white cock he heard the voices of his spirits.
Halaou ran to every fight shouting out that the cannon was bamboo, the gunpowder no more than dust. I, Riau, had heard such words before, from the mouth of Boukman (which was lipless now, for Boukman’s head