Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [380]
In ten years the mapou had grown larger, there where the mambo cut the throat of the black pig, where Boukman, ridden by his spirit, cried into the burning sky, Kouté la libèté k’ap palé nan kè nou tou! Toussaint was there, though hidden in the shadows. He did not try to show his face or hand that night, though I, Riau, had seen him. I saw the mosquito settle on his cheek. Since then Toussaint should have carried Boukman’s words with him, as Riau carried them always—listen to liberty that speaks in the hearts of us all.
Wind shook the high limbs of that mapou, and I turned my horse to ride away. As I left the clearing the thought came to me that the loa who brushed the doctor might be the same that walked with me, an Ogûn, not Feraille but Balendjo, the one who walks with a traveler. Riau was glad that Ogûn Balendjo was near, to carry him across the plain when he came out from under the old trees of Bois Caïman. There it was open country, and too close to all the French blanc soldiers at Le Cap, but it was the shortest way to Grande Rivière and that was why I took it. A patrol of blanc horse soldiers saw me from a long way off, but they did not have one horse as good as mine, and when they chased me their horses bogged in the low ground, because only I, Riau, knew where the dry trails ran between the boggy places.
There were mosquitoes in the wet land of the plain, or maybe this one mosquito had followed me out of Bois Caïman, I thought. He whined around my head but did not bite, and I did not try to crush him because his voice brought me the memory of Macandal, who flew off on the wings of a mosquito when the blancs burned his body at Le Cap. They thought that was the end of Macandal’s plan to kill all the blancs, but all of our people who saw that mosquito cried out Macandal sové! We had been forced into the square to see him burn, but what we cried was Macandal is free! Those words were singing in my body, and everywhere I rode was Macandal’s country, the place of his marronage, and Riau’s too, in the time before our rising. From a long way off the thought reached me that if Macandal were not just one mosquito but a thousand times a thousand, he would drink the blood of all the blancs until they withered and dried up and blew away across the sea, like the burnt bagasse that blew from the burning cane fields. Many of those fields lay burned around me where I rode.
As I came into the valley of Grande Rivière, a dozen of Sans-Souci’s men rose out of the ground like smoke, and they were all around me and my horse before I knew. The spirit of Macandal had so filled Riau’s head that I did not have clear eyes to see them coming. Now when I shook my head and looked for that mosquito it was gone.
The men took me through the bourg of Grande Rivière and on into the hills to the grand’case of a coffee habitation that the blancs had run away from long before, where Sans-Souci sat on the gallery, eating chicken. When I came there he called my name and shared his food with me. He stood up to take my hand when I climbed the steps to his table, and I saw how small he was, with short arms and legs like the legs of a turtle, and yet the force in him was so great he always seemed twice bigger than he was.
Riau had last seen Sans-Souci when he brought his blanc prisoners to Toussaint at Marmelade, and that was not so long ago, but still Sans-Souci wanted to know where Riau had been and what he had done since. I told him that I had seen the blanc general Leclerc going up the road with all his soldiers to Le Cap, and Sans-Souci grunted and said he knew Leclerc was there. I did not tell him about the doctor and Maillart and those people on the road. They would have got to Le Cap