Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [338]
Toussaint made a headquarters at Marmelade, and no blanc soldier came any nearer to him there than Gonaives. There were no blancs at all in the mountains by then, because those on the habitations who had not been killed in all the fighting had run away to the towns on the coast. Sometimes there was talk of French blanc soldiers at Plaisance again, but if they came there they did not stay long, because Sylla was behind them there, with the men he had fighting in the hills above Limbé, and Toussaint kept his own men going back and forth between Marmelade through Limbé to Acul, because, unless he could take Gonaives back from the blancs, the Baie d’Acul was the only place where he could touch the sea. So the only part of the country the blancs could really hold was the low ground of the plain around Le Cap, and even there Toussaint kept trying to start risings in the ateliers, with his story that the blancs were sure to bring back slavery.
I did not know how the blancs were doing in the rest of the country, and maybe they had been more successful there. Toussaint wanted Dessalines to take back the ground around La Crête à Pierrot from them, but he had not yet been able to do it.
Only a few days after our big fight with Hardy’s soldiers in the pass below Dondon, Sans-Souci came into Marmelade with a lot of French blanc soldiers he had taken prisoner in a fight around Grande Rivière. Boyer, who was a colored general who had been with the party of Rigaud before, brought fifteen hundred French blanc soldiers to fight Sans-Souci at Sainte Suzanne and other places, but Sans-Souci had beaten them all and driven them back into Le Cap, even though these were new soldiers who had just come over on new ships from France.
This news interested Toussaint very much, and it seemed bad to me at first. I did not forget how strong those ships had looked when they were blowing up the forts of the harbor at Port-au-Prince, and how those French blanc soldiers would run all over everything, like ants, when they were fresh. How could we ever kill them all, if they kept pouring out of France?
A lot of our people wanted to kill Sans-Souci’s prisoners right away, and I don’t think Sans-Souci would have been unhappy to see them die. There was not anyone who hated the blancs more than he did, except for Dessalines. But Toussaint treated these prisoners very well. He killed cows for them to eat, and he found shoes for the ones who did not have any shoes. A lot of them had come from France without shoes, we heard, or else their shoes broke very fast on the rocks of our country. They said they had come without enough guns either on their ship, which interested Toussaint very much also. There were four hundred of these captured soldiers. He asked their leaders a lot of questions, and when he had taken their knives and guns away, he gave them the freedom of the quarter of Marmelade, as it would have been liberté de savane in slavery time. These blanc soldiers did not have a clear idea where they were, and there were too many of our people around them for them to try to get away.
These French blanc soldiers spent their days running races and climbing trees and jumping from one rock to another or across the streams in the ravines, or practicing fighting against each other with their hands. I did not see any of them pull down a wild horse by the ears, but they were very active and strong. Our women and children came out to watch them from behind the trees, laughing and covering their mouths with their hands. Some of our men began to worry again about how many such soldiers might still be coming from France. But Toussaint only looked at