Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [447]
Then Dessalines’s band played “La Carmagnole” and the soldiers marched all the blancs to La Fossette and killed them there, the men, the women, and the children, all, but I, Riau, I did not follow to that killing ground. I ran away for the last time into marronage, because I did not want to kill any more people whether they were blancs or not. Later on I heard that at first the other soldiers did not want to start the killing either, until Clervaux caught a blanc baby by its legs and smashed its brains out on a rock, and so the rest of them were able to begin.
I knew that when Toussaint had asked the grand blancs back to live in peace and freedom, they betrayed him and sent him away to die alone in France. Boisrond Tonnerre gave the words to Dessalines: For our declarationof independence we must have the skin of a blanc for parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for pen. I knew the reason Dessalines acted as he did, but still I did not want to join in that action. At first I went to Grande Rivière, though Sans-Souci was already dead by that time. Christophe had tricked Sans-Souci to a meeting at the foot of Morne la Ferrière and killed him there. Later on, when Dessalines was killed too, Riau came home to Ennery.
There was nothing I could do to save my captain Maillart.
People say that when the soldiers came back with their bloody hands from La Fossette, the band did not play any music at all, but I, Riau, I was not there to hear them if they played or not. Before that day, Dessalines had already gone down to Arcahaye, where he tore the white band from the middle of the French flag, and Catherine Flon sewed the red and the blue cloth together. Since then there are no more blancs in Haiti. Even the doctor is nèg.
Sometimes when the day is ending, I sit and drink rum with the doctor on the gallery of the grand’case at Thibodet. During those times we do not talk much, but only listen to the voices of the doves finding their nests under the eaves, and the hum of the bees who go in and out of the holes they have bored in the wood of the gallery. When the sky darkens I feel that the doctor is thinking how everything might have ended differently if Toussaint had not gone to meet Brunet that day, or if some other small thing had been other than it was. Maybe it could have been, but it is not.
Depi nan Ginen, nèg rayi nèg, the old people say. Since Africa, people have hated one another. I see it is not the only truth, but there is much to prove it. I see that Christophe killed Sans-Souci because neither he nor Dessalines could bear to know that Sans-Souci began the last fight against the blancs before them, and they could not bear that others knew it too. I see that Dessalines and Christophe and even Maurepas did work of the left hand against Toussaint for the same reason, and for that same reason Dessalines killed Charles Belair. Now Dessalines is dead himself, his body torn to pieces where they killed him at Pont Rouge, and Christophe after him is dead, killed by a bullet of his own gun in the midst of another rising.
I, Riau, will live to grow old. Already I have made more than half my journey. In the letterbox I keep the names of many who have gone beneath the waters or will go, Macandal, Boukman, Moyse, Toussaint, Sans-Souci, Charles Belair, Maurepas, Dessalines, Christophe, CharlemagnePeralte, Benoît Batraville, Sonson Pasquet, Riquet Pepignard, Phito Dominique, Jean Chenet, Jacques Alexis, Richard Brisson, Gerald Brisson, Gusle Villedrouin, Roger Rigaud, Réginal Jourdan, Louis Drouin, Marcel Numa, Georges Izmery, Antoine Izmery, Père Jean-Marie Vincent, Guy Malary, Amos Jeannot, Brignol Lindor, Jean Dominique . . . There are worms who come into the box to feed on the paper where the names are written. Those worms are too small for the eye to see, and they do not hurt the wood