Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [96]
After this had happened, Hyacinthe came out of prison, released by Sonthonax. Like Halaou, he was both warrior and hûngan, and many of Halaou’s men had been with Hyacinthe before, and went back to him now he had returned, but the colored men teased Hyacinthe to a meeting and killed him, as Halaou was killed. Bébé Coustard attacked Croix des Bouquets with men that had been with Hyacinthe and Halaou, and all the colored men were trapped in the church, but one of them came out alone to parlay and killed Bébé Coustard with his musket, and seeing him dead the men were afraid and threw down their weapons and scattered.
I, Riau, went with Dieudonné, who gathered some of those men who had run together again at Habitation Nerrettes. Then the English and the grand blanc French came both in ships and overland to attack Port-au-Prince, and Sonthonax had no soldiers left to fight for him except colored soldiers who wanted to go over to the English anyway, so Sonthonax ran away to the colored General Rigaud in the south. When he stopped at Nerrettes plantation, Sonthonax gave his ribbons and the big commissioner’s coin to Dieudonné, and said with this gift went all his powers that he had brought out of France, and he warned Dieudonné against the colored men, saying, Do not forget, so long as you see colored men among your own, you will not be free. But later on we learned that when Sonthonax came to Rigaud, he gave Rigaud the command of the colony as he had given it to Dieudonné (though only Dieudonné had the medal and the ribbons).
A boat had come from France, bringing a paper of French government that said the slaves of Saint Domingue were free, but Sonthonax climbed into the boat and sailed away. If he was the BonDyé for our freedom, he was gone now, like Halaou’s white cock.
Fok nou oué nan jé nou—we must see with our own eyes. Yet I thought it had cost Halaou very much to look at the face of Sonthonax, so I left Dieudonné then and went back to Bahoruco, where I sat inside the clay walls of the cay which shut out the sunlight, and looked at the whiteman things by the candle flame. Sonthonax had gone away. In the west wherever the English came they brought back the grand blanc French who had been slave masters, and whatever the paper said, there would be slavery under them. Rigaud might say he fought for the Republican French who wrote the freedom paper, yet he and the colored men with him had all been slave masters before the risings. Whatever black leader put his head above the rest was cut down and killed like Halaou. Perhaps after all there was only Toussaint.
The whiteman must know a reason for each thing which he does, but with the people of Guinée, it is not so. I had a spirit walking with me, whether Kalfou or Ogûn-Feraille, and had only to go where the spirit would lead me, as Halaou followed the white cock. I stopped the candle and put the whiteman things back into the hole in the wall and covered them, and then went out of the cay. The sunlight was a shock to my eyes, so that I stood blinking. I had not eaten since I woke, but I was not yet hungry. I went up into the provision ground behind the cay. Butterflies floated over the flowers on the plants of pwa rouj. The beans were not yet ready to pick, but the corn tassels were turning brown. I picked some ears and piled them, and then dug yams with a pointed stick hardened in the fire, until I met Jean-Pic coming the other way along the planting. He looked at all the vivres I had gathered and then into my face.
“I am going north,” I said. “Will you come?”
Jean-Pic looked all around, at the green trees hanging to the sides of the mountain, the red-earth cliff across the gorge, with terraces to hold up cays. He scratched the back of his head, and said, “Was it the cacique who told you to do that?”
I lifted my shoulders and let them fall. The cacique had not spoken any language that we understood, which Jean-Pic knew as well as Riau, but maybe it