Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [133]
Dessalines sent twenty-five horsemen out the road to Port-au-Prince, to see if that way was open now, and I, Riau, went with them to see what they would learn. By this time I thought I had seen the idea behind Dessalines’s head. He had drawn Boudet, with many of his men, to the north of Port-au-Prince into the plain of Cul de Sac. If Boudet was still there, trying to learn the passes to Mirebalais where the blanc prisoners had been taken, or maybe fighting Lamartinière at Habitation Jonc, then maybe Dessalines could get into Port-au-Prince from the south, where no one would expect him to be, and burn the town at last as Toussaint had ordered, while the French blanc soldiers left it unguarded.
But there were still more French blanc soldiers on the road—many dragoons, fresh and well mounted, with red feathers in their helmets that swam in the air like flames. They were riding down toward Léogane as if they would attack us there. When Dessalines had got this news, he was even angrier than he had been the day before on the banks of Rivière Froide. Still, the day was not done yet. Dessalines had his men take all the cannons of Léogane, and all the powder and shot from the magazine, and any other stores they could carry, and bring them to the mountains of Cabaret Quart.
At the same time Dessalines went, with the help of Pierre Louis Diane, from one house to another through all the town, and swept all the blancs who lived there into the square of Léogane, which was a quiet place shaded by many tall old trees. When they were all brought there, one of the blancs stepped out from the others and began to read the proclamation of Napoleon Bonaparte, which said that the free black men of Saint Domingue were never to be made slaves any more, but he had not read more than the first words before Dessalines changed his snuffbox from one hand to the other, and the blanc was shot.
I wondered what Dessalines meant to do with all these people. There were four hundred of them nearly, and he could not take them back across the mountains the way we had come.
There was one man among them all, Fossin, who knew me well enough to catch my eyes, with his own eyes pleading, though he did not dare to speak, after the shooting of that other blanc. I knew him because he was one of the blancs who spied for Toussaint on the others, and sometimes I had received his messages. Also his wife was a blanche thought beautiful by many, and one of those who came in secret to Toussaint’s bed, to get some advantage for their families, or because they were drawn to his power. She was not there at Léogane that day, which was a lucky thing for her.
I took Fossin away from the others and brought him before Dessalines, and I explained that Toussaint would not want this one blanc to be mistreated. Dessalines looked at him for a long time, his fingers turning the snuffbox around and around, but in the end he said that Fossin was free to leave Léogane and go out and meet the soldiers on the road, if that would be his choice. Out of four hundred blancs that day in Léogane, he was the only one to go free.
The drum rolled then, and we began marching the crowd of blancs out of the square and through the streets and finally into the wide bed of the river. Our men were close around them with their bayonets for all that way, though it was not long, and the little snare drum kept rolling. At the place where we stopped the riverbed was a shoal of dry stones, because there had been no rain in this part of the country. There was no shade either, except along one bank where a little trickle of water still ran in a deeper part of the streambed. But we had stopped the prisoners in the full sun, and it was so hot I could feel the river stones burning through the soles of my boots.
Our men began to go among the prisoners and take whatever they had that was valuable. Of course they were not so willing to give up their goods, and many had hidden things in their clothing, so that the men went groping all over them