Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [189]
At moonrise, Toussaint rose and addressed the men in a low voice, scarcely louder than a whisper, though somehow it carried to them all.
“Open your shirts,” he said, with a gesture toward his own top buttons. “You will find on your bodies the brands of slavery. For ten years you have fought for freedom, and the memory of servitude has been burned off the face of this land by fire.”
From the place where he’d been sitting by the stream, Guiaou stood up. The deep scars on his face and throat were silvered and softened by the moonlight. Then another man stood up, and another and another, with a wave of rustling, until all were standing. The doctor stood too. Though the boy was rather a heavy load, he hitched him up onto his hip so that he could see Toussaint’s small and slightly bowlegged figure, standing under the west bank of the ravine. Toussaint had left his own clothing closed. A high collar pushed up under his chin, and his coat was closed with a wide red sash. The scabbard of his sword scuffed on the gravel, while in his hands he held, somewhat incongruously, a dandy’s cane.
“The enemies who come against us have no faith, nor law, nor religion. They come again with branding irons and chains, and if their lips still promise liberty, slavery hides in their secret, constant thought. They come as strangers, to a land that will always be alien to them. Our enemies are walking toward you over fields of ash and coal. Their skins have never been marked by slavery, and their women and children are far away across the ocean, along with the graves of their fathers. You who stand against them now have seen the earth and the rocks soaked with the blood of those who have gone before you in the battle. You know how the trees and the air itself are full of the spirits of those who’ve left their bodies on the field. Our enemies will never prosper, for our land itself rejects them, and when they breathe our air their strength fades from them and their courage fails. Nothing in our land will ever give them comfort. Let their bones be scattered over our mountains, or tumbled in the waves beneath our waters.”
Toussaint signaled with his cane, and the troops began to filter up the gorge. No more than six hundred men all told, by the doctor’s best estimation, had marched from Gonaives. But as they climbed he realized that others had been waiting for them here. At every bend of the winding ravine was a new entrenchment, staked with palisades, with hundreds upon hundreds of field hands armed with muskets and dug in to the points of their teeth. Toussaint stopped for a quick word at each of these positions before pressing on. The trail zigzagged, sometimes following or crossing the stream along the floor of the ravine, sometimes scrambling to the top of the cliffs above. Along the bottom of the ravine grew ancient palms, following the twists and turns of the streambed, their roots driving through the gravel to scarce water. Many had been felled to reinforce the entrenchments, and fresh-torn wood was pale on the stumps and the hewn trunks.
At last a bend of the trail through a dark grove brought them into the open on a high bank, and in view of the rolling curve of Morne Barade, still a considerable distance farther on, at the head of the gorge. The dark hill was calm under the moon, and there was no spark of any human light, but Toussaint halted. The doctor, sitting his mule behind Placide, thought he heard a click of beads, and then the voice: “Almighty God, give me the grace to reach that place before the enemy!—just half an hour more to march.”
There was moonlight enough for Placide to read the face of the watch he had brought home from France: a quarter to eleven when Toussaint halted the column under the shadow of Morne Barade. Toussaint dismounted, and with a whisper summoned Placide, Guiaou, Guerrier, and a fourth man named Panzou. On foot they moved quietly up the trail, with Toussaint leading. The trail passed into