Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [446]
Merbillay still cooks for the grand’case, though all the blancs are gone. Only the doctor stays there now, with Nanon and Paul, who is a man now too, married to one of Fontelle’s younger daughters. And Fontelle stays there, and Zabeth and the children she made with Bouquart and Michau, and I have written their names too and put them into the box, where no one ever reads them but Riau.
Only the blanc gunrunner Tocquet seemed to understand what was certain to happen when Dessalines called all the grand blancs to come back to the country and make sugar and coffee again on their plantations, the same way that Toussaint had done before. Only Tocquet saw how different was Dessalines’s spirit from the spirit that once had walked with Toussaint. Those blancs made a reunion in the Cigny house at Le Cap and I, Riau, stood with Bazau and Gros-Jean in the next room, so I heard some of what they said. I heard Madame Isabelle Cigny stamp her foot and cry, “It cannot happen again. It will not!” Then Tocquet said in a low voice, “But it will,” and Isabelle demanded, “Why?” Tocquet did not often raise his voice, though he was always ready to slit a throat, but I could hear his anger when he answered, “It will happen again. It will never stop happening. Because the people who rule don’t know history.”
Then Tocquet took Elise and Sophie and Mireille across the border at Ouanaminthe, with Bazau and Gros-Jean and their women and children and a few others who wanted to go with them. None of the other blancs would go, however Elise begged. They all still wanted to believe in the world Toussaint meant to make, where he had saved a place for them. All but Tocquet’s people. From Santo Domingo they took a ship to North America, and sometimes even now the doctor has a letter from his sister in the place called Louisiana where they stay, but those people will never come back any more.
There are no more blancs in Haiti. At Thibodet, no one grows cane, but only coffee, and not much of that. The doctor treats the sick of all the canton of Ennery, and so the people in the grand’case live, though usually he does not ask for pay.
Sometimes I put names of blancs in the box, though I do not know for certain why I do it. I have written, Isabelle Cigny, Robert Cigny, Héloïse Cigny. Michel Arnaud, and Claudine Arnaud. Monsieur Cigny I have written too, though now I can’t remember any longer if his name was Bernard or Bertrand, and besides he was killed before the others and in a different place. It was not long after Tocquet took his family across the border that Dessalines hunted all the blancs of Le Cap out of their houses and herded them into the Place d’Armes. Some of these blancs tried to pretend they really were gens de couleur, but then the soldiers made them sing—
Nanon pralé chaché dlo
krich-li casé . . .
Anyone who sang French words instead of Creole was known to be a blanc.
Nanon’s going to look for water
her jug is broken . . .
They were all caught, whose names Riau has written, and the doctor was taken with them. The doctor could have sung that song very well, but he would not do it. His own Nanon and Paul were not taken, since it was plain Nanon and Paul had the blood of Guinée. When he walked before the blancs who were herded together in the Place d’Armes, Dessalines stopped to look at the doctor for a long time, but the doctor never dropped his eyes, and finally Dessalines moved his snuffbox to his right hand and said, Li nèg —and the soldiers let the doctor walk away. He is black, Dessalines had said. The doctor’s back was straight