Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [134]
I did not kill anyone else after that, but stood apart and watched the killing. I did not really want to watch, but Dessalines would have not liked for anyone to turn his face away. It was all done with bayonets and knives, to save powder and shot, so it was a slow and ugly thing.
Now, long before this time, Riau had done such killings too, and delighted to paint himself in the blood of blancs, or to use their women and kill them after. But in that time, all blancs appeared as monsters to me. They were nothing like me or other children of Guinée. They were only loup-garou sent to torture us out of the life of our bodies. Also, on those days of blood long before, I often had my spirit in my head, so it was not I, Riau, who killed, or if it was, I killed to feed the lwa. And afterward, what I remembered of what Riau had done would be like a story told about the doings of another.
Those times seemed a long way off, almost as far as Guinée itself, which Riau could hardly remember. Since then I had come to know a few blancs, like the doctor, and even his friend the Captain Maillart, and some few others, who did not seem to be monsters out of another world, but persons like myself. Among the hundreds screaming in their blood there in the riverbed, I thought there must be at least a few like that. And my spirit was very far away!—so far I could not recall it. I was alone in my head as I watched the killing, with my two eyes drying up as I forced them to stay open, wondering if Ogûn would ever dance in my head again. It seemed I was alone more and more in this way, and I wondered what was to blame for it. I thought of the service I owed to the spirit of Moyse, and of all the things Quamba said that I must do, but it seemed evil to think of those things in that place, as if I had no right any more even to touch them with my thoughts.
When the killing was finished, a horn was blown and our men began to form up slowly, to march out of the riverbed. Some of the men were in blood frenzy, with spirits mounted in their heads, and these walked as in a dream, with their bloody knives hanging down from their hands. The rest of the men could not meet each other’s eyes. They were all very tired from the work they had done, and I was tired too, though I had only been watching. I thought I had come a long way out of the good road, and all my turnings had been wrong.
As we were leaving, some bony yellow dogs came from the other bank down into the riverbed and lowered their heads shyly to begin licking the blood that still smoked on the stones. I looked back over my shoulder once and saw that some long-eared black pigs had joined them, grunting as they rooted among the bodies and turned the soft parts upward with their snouts. Then I wished that a flood would come, and wash it all away into the ocean. It was for that the work had been done in the riverbed, but there would be no rain today—the sky above us was empty.
Dessalines set fire to Léogane before we left it. He had saved enough powder to blow up the magazine. He was taking his army to Cabaret Quart. Some men had deserted during the hard march the day before, and others would slip away today, but not Riau. Dessalines knew me too well—I would be missed. I went to him then and said again how Toussaint had given me words for Laplume, and that I would not get a better chance than I had now to go to the south to find him. Dessalines was ready to let me go, and he told me I should bring him word of Laplume’s reply, if it was possible, because he had already heard a rumor that Laplume might be meaning to sell himself