Stone That the Builder Refused - Madison Smartt Bell [81]
Word was that the blanche Elise had come back to the grand’case here, with her youngest child, and Zabeth and her baby. They were going away from some trouble at Le Cap. French ships had come there too, but that was as much as any one I talked to seemed to know about it. From Zabeth my head turned to Bouquart who was the father of her child. Bouquart was dead now, because he had joined in the soulèvement with Moyse, and when Toussaint commanded Bouquart to shoot himself, he did not think that he might not do it.
None of this was long ago. It was not yet one year since Moyse had died, shot by a row of muskets at the fort of Port-de-Paix, and Moyse had given the order himself for the men to fire their bullets into him. Riau was witness to that shooting, and maybe he had been part of the cause of it too.
Ogûn-O... Djab-la di l’ap manjé moin, si sa vré . . .
Riau had known Moyse for longer still than he had known Jean-Pic. They knew each other from slavery time at Bréda, where each of them had Toussaint for his parrain, though Riau ran away into marronage, and Moyse stayed. In the days of the first risings Riau and Moyse killed many blancs together. When Riau ran away from Toussaint’s army into a second marronage, it was Moyse who received him back again, and maybe Moyse had saved him from being shot, when Toussaint might have ordered this for Riau’s deserting. Now Moyse was dead, but Riau had not served his spirit, and there on the hill at Ennery I felt his spirit at my back, and very near.
This was the shame given to Riau by the eyes of Lamour Dérance. When Moyse made the soulèvement against Toussaint, Riau knew his reasons. I was even in the same spirit with Moyse then, because Toussaint was making the army to be like commandeurs for the blancs to make people work in the fields with their hoes in a way too much like slavery time had been. I knew the mind of Toussaint also, which was thinking we must make sugar and coffee to turn into money because that money must buy guns to fight the French soldiers if they came again. When they came. But my heart was with Moyse. Still, when I heard that Moyse’s people had risen in the north, I sent Guiaou south to warn Toussaint, and I told him to be certain to tell Toussaint it was Riau who sent him. I did this because I saw that Moyse was not going to win this time, and if I followed my heart to Moyse it might be Riau, and not Bouquart, that Toussaint ordered to blow out his own brains.
Lamour Dérance rose in favor of Moyse in the south then. Toussaint was at Verrettes when it all started, and it did not take him long to put it down. But Riau’s name, which I had told Guiaou to give Toussaint, must have reached Lamour Dérance also in this business. As for Guiaou, his head was so full of Toussaint that there was no room for anything else and nothing else behind it. Toussaint put Guiaou into his honor guard, later on when the soulèvement was broken and everyone he ordered to be shot was dead, and gave Guiaou the silver helmet to wear on his head. That was a great thing for Guiaou, because all the men in the honor guard were tall and handsome, where Guiaou had his face and body spoiled by shark teeth and saber cuts.
Ogûn-O... Djab-la di l’ap manjé moin, si sa vré? Men genyen BonDyé O, genyen tou les sen yo . . .
There was the hole where the devil had come in. I saw this now, standing outside the hûnfor. And I saw how the devil could be sent away too. Voyé djab-la alé!
Quamba stepped up to me then. He had been standing in the shadow by the fence for some little time, I did not know how long. The bone flute was in his hand but he was not playing it. Quamba had become hûngan in the place, after the old hûngan had died. He had his case now on the first flat ground cut out of the hill on the path below the hûnfor, and I had passed there as I climbed, though as I told him