Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [129]
“Sé fils Papa Toussaint ou yé!” they cried. You are the sons of Papa Toussaint! Placide could not imagine how they had known it, yet they did know. The crowd pressed tight around the horses, dividing the riders from each other. Placide could see from their pale drawn faces that Cyprien and Daspir were uneasy in the crush, and the French cavalrymen looked positively afraid, but neither of the officers gave any order. There was no order to be given; this riot was peaceful, no weapon in sight. Among the whites, only the doctor seemed at ease, and Isabelle, but the crowd did not press on her so closely, still somewhat in awe of a white woman.
They swarmed around Placide’s and Isaac’s horses, grasping their stirrups, the flaps of their saddles, stroking their trouser legs and reaching up to touch their hands and feel the fabric of their shirt cuffs and coat sleeves. Other hands came stretching up to present bunches of bananas and baskets of limes and lemons and oranges and avocados, none offered for sale but all in gift. The chill of the mountain mist was gone, and not only because rays of the westering sun had begun to cut through the cloud, but that the compression of so many bodies and beings around them created a warmth that was almost suffocating. Placide was a little alarmed himself at first, if only at the unidentifiable wave of feeling that built in him. Then whatever held it back gave way and the feeling poured out of him to flow into the being of all those others who were other no more.
“Nou la!” Placide said in his strongest voice. His face was wet with the push and pull of the internal tide. “Nou la,” the shining faces upturned to him replied. The words meant simply We are here, but also, We are here and you are here with us and We have survived to arrive here in this place where we are meant to be together.
Placide looked to Isaac and saw to his sadness that his brother understood nothing of what he felt and knew. In truth, Isaac’s French was more perfect than Placide’s, since Isaac had been younger when they were sent from home to the Collège de la Marche. But for the same reason the nuances of their Creole mother tongue, which had been rushing back to Placide since they landed, did not return so readily to Isaac. Indeed, the tightness of his face was something like the tension Placide saw in the French officers. He watched Isaac, saying nothing. Isaac reined up his horse so tight that it began to crab sideways, shunting away the people that surrounded him, creating a space in which he was alone.
Some of the hussars had laid hands to their saber hilts. Placide could see they were ready to draw and begin swatting people away from them with the flats of the blades. Captain Daspir must have seen this too, for he called out, “Leave that! Let no man touch a weapon!”
“Avancez!” Cyprien said crisply. Move on! Their column re-formed and Placide was closed within it, cut off from the people of the market. Then they had crossed the crest of the mountain and were going down under the red sun that shone on the scrubby cliff walls of this drier face. Placide twisted in the saddle to look back once, but he could not see the people any more, only the face of the doctor smiling back at him from his place in the line, and dark thunderheads piling up above Pilboreau. He faced forward, looking down the hairpin turns that lined the edges of the gorge below them, believing they’d reach Ennery before the rain.
14
I left Dessalines at Saint Marc then, standing among the burning torches and the tar barrels that had been gathered for the burning of that town. I rode for the south as fast as I could go, which was not so very fast since my horse was tired from the many days of long riding that had come before. In Arcahaye the people ran after me asking for news, catching at the leather skirts of my saddle and my boot heels and even the tail