Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [337]
But once in the woods it was all different. The trunks of the trees broke up the charge of the French blanc soldiers. They began to stumble and separate from each other and they did not know how to shoot very well among the trees. I saw then that they did tire quickly, as Toussaint had said, after their first big try. The fear that was with me went away, and I caught up with Guiaou and Guerrier at the edge of the trees, where a narrow road went off among coffee terraces. Guiaou was tightening the knot of his mouchwa têt, getting ready to turn against the French blanc soldiers again. He and Guerrier did ride down on the blancs and cut a few of them with their coutelas, before Hardy could get his own horse soldiers to come up. Hardy’s men were in trouble now, with our men shooting them one by one from behind the trees, and Christophe, who had got away, was forming up his regular troops to go back into the fight.
But I, Riau, I rode as fast as I could around all this fighting, back toward Dondon, to let Toussaint know that it had begun. Maybe he knew already from the noise, or he was watching somewhere from the top of a morne. I met Placide with Morisset, leading the riders of the honor guard into the battle. In place of his silver helmet, Placide today wore a red mouchwa, and from the wideness of his eyes and the far distance they were looking, I thought some spirit was in his head, one strong enough that I could feel it too. Everything seemed calmer to me then, and the noise of the fighting was farther off, as if I heard it from under water. Placide was carrying a French three-colored flag into the fighting. I sent my message on to Toussaint by another man and turned to ride with Placide and Morisset, moving up to the head of the line to show them where to find the enemy.
The French blanc soldiers ran from us when Morisset’s riders smashed into them, and Toussaint’s foot soldiers were coming up very fast behind. We chased them through the pass which drops through the Black Mountains from Dondon, down the snake-back road onto the low ground of the Northern Plain. In that open country, Hardy formed his men into squares again, so that we could not attack them so easily, but they were still retreating, and as fast as they could, and they had left many dead under the trees and by the roadside. Hardy had dropped a lot of what he had taken at La Coupe à l’Inde, and a lot of the animals he had stolen were scattered, so that we could catch them later on, but Bel Argent was still with him as he hurried to Le Cap. That horse was not easy to keep up with. For some reason Toussaint decided not to keep chasing Hardy after darkness came, even though he had not got back Bel Argent. Our men were all tired from long hours of running and fighting, but we had beaten these blanc soldiers who looked so strong, and we had driven them all out of the mountains, even if we had not been able to catch and kill them all as Toussaint would have wished.
After that day the French blanc soldiers could not hold on anywhere in the mountains of the north. In the days that followed, Toussaint took over all his old posts from Grande Rivière to Marmelade. From what I had seen in earlier times, I thought he would be thinking that if he could fight through from Marmelade to take Gonaives again, he could cut the country in half the way he had done when he was fighting other blancs before, the English or the Spanish. These mountains were the root of Toussaint’s power, and I think the spirits that sometimes walked with him