Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [231]
Now, the blancs at Port-au-Prince had already heard the men of the Eighth Demibrigade were coming against them from the direction of Grande Rivière, while Dessalines had reached Arcahaye, which was not very far off at all. Lacroix told Lamour Dérance and Lafortune that if their men could beat the men of the Eighth, they might take anything the men of the Eighth had, if it was clothes or boots or guns or money. Lamour Dérance and Lafortune accepted this idea easily, and so General Lacroix sent out some of his blanc soldiers to meet the Eighth from the front direction, while Lamour Dérance and Lafortune circled through the hills above the town to catch them from behind.
I, Riau, went with Lamour Dérance and with me came Major Maillart and a couple of other blanc officers who wanted to see how the thing would be done. Those maroons could run fast on the hill trails no matter how steep, even carrying muskets and the cartridge boxes the blancs had just filled from their armories. I took off my boots and strung them over my shoulder because I could move better without them on those trails. The blanc officers were soon red-faced and breathless, though Maillart got along better than the rest, since he was better used to the country.
It was the Eighth Demibrigade that had cut up Lamour Dérance’s people near Marigot before, so they carried that anger into the battle, though the Eighth had been commanded by Dessalines in that battle, and today it was Pierre Louis Diane who was at the head of the Eighth. Pierre Louis Diane expected to meet the French blanc soldiers and expected that their numbers would be small, but when the maroons rushed on them from behind, they were not ready and soon they were full of confusion and fear. A lot were killed in the first few minutes and more than a thousand captured. Then the men of Lamour Dérance and Lafortune took everything from the dead and the prisoners too, except Pierre Louis Diane and his officers. They were sent by General Lacroix to be held prisoner on the ships that waited in the harbor.
Chancy was still shut in the Port-au-Prince guardhouse, but Pierre Louis Diane and his officers were put onto the ships. I saw that Lacroix knew the danger was not finished for him and his men yet, because Dessalines had not yet come. The story of Dessalines and of all the blancs whose throats were slit on his order or by his own hand had traveled a long way before him by then. By nighttime, the men of Lamour Dérance and Lafortune were not much use to the blancs any more because they were having a big bamboche at the edge of the town in their happiness at plundering the Eighth Demibrigade, with rum and fires and drums and dancing. Only I went with Jean-Pic and a few of the others who were not drunk or ridden by their spirits, with Maillart on the order of Lacroix to lay ambushes on the roads from Arcahaye. At the same time Lacroix had got the captain of all the ships to send many of his sailors from the ships into the town to help defend it.
The moon was high and bright enough that we saw easily to shoot at Dessalines’s scouts when they appeared on the road from Arcahaye. A few fell in the first shooting, and the rest scattered quickly away along the road they had come. At the same time we could hear shooting at Croix des Bouquets too, but it did not go on for long at any of these places. Some fires could be seen on the Cul de Sac plain, where Dessalines’s men were burning whatever cases they might have missed burning the last time they passed that way. At the sight of the fires, all the blancs in the town began to cry Dessalines! Dessalines is coming! and the hand of Major Maillart got very tight and hard on his sword grip and the ends of his mustache were quivering, but Dessalines did not come. He had heard what had happened with the Eighth that day, and he knew now that the blancs were more ready for him than he had hoped. So he went away across the plain of Cul