Authors: Nick Lake
I thought that was stupid. I thought Marguerite was valuable now. Manman looked like she was going to cry, and I didn’t blame her. But there was one thing I was grateful for: Marguerite was alive.
— I’ll get her back, I said.
Manman, she kind of nodded her head.
— It’s hard, she said. But we should count our blessings. We’re alive and we’re together, you and me. We have each other.
— Yeah, I said.
Manman, she liked to count her blessings. It didn’t usually take long.
We walked across the sand to where the fishermen moored their boats. I could see the one Papa and his friend used. I wondered then if Papa really was a fisherman. Manman wouldn’t tell me where the gun had come from, but what if it was his? What if he was a chimère, too?
Maybe I didn’t wonder that, actually. It’s hard for me to remember. But I do wonder it now.
— I’ll do whatever it takes, I told Manman. I’ll bring Marguerite home.
— OK, she said. OK.
I don’t think she believed me – but she should have. If she had, I might not be in this mess. When you keep hurting someone, you do one of three things. Either you fill them up with hate, and they destroy everything around them. Or you fill them up with sadness, and they destroy themselves. Or you fill them up with justice, and they try to destroy everything that’s bad and cruel in this world.
Me, I was the first kind of person.
In his dream, Toussaint rode back to Bois Caiman. He knew the blind houngan lived there. People said he could speak to the alligators and had become their king. They said there were dead people in the marshes, zombis who he had put there and that he could make rise up and kill anyone who threatened him. Toussaint thought those were good stories to put about if you wanted to be left alone, and anyway, he knew perfectly well how zombis were made – it was a process more of pharmacology than death.
He followed a dim light through the trees, careful of the swamp on both sides of the track. A small voice inside him said that this was not really happening, but he was still scared.
There was a rich, vegetable smell of decay. It was dark, the moon that had been so full and fat the previous night obscured by dense clouds. He could see very little other than the looming shapes of the trees, the spidery shadows of the vines. Last night he had been amongst friends – fellow slaves. Tonight he was a warm living thing in the midst of an indifference of chilly mud. He could easily imagine that the smell came from rotting bodies, that there
were
dead people, zombis, in the mud to either side . . .
He shivered, tightening his grip on the horse’s bridle. He focused on the light, followed it until he came to a small hut. He dismounted, tethered the horse, and knocked before entering.
The blind houngan sat on a chair in a simple, clean room. Except for some jars of powder, two chairs, some veves drawn on the floor, the room was empty.
— You came back, said the houngan.
— Yes. Is this real? Am I here? Or is it a dream?
— Can’t it be both? said the houngan. Tell me. This spirit that is inside you, do you want me to take it out?
— I want you to . . . I don’t know. What is it? I told the others it was Ogou, but I don’t think that’s true.
— I don’t know for certain what it is, said the houngan. It’s not Ogou Badagry, I agree. I would’ve been aware of his coming. We all would – Ogou is the lwa of war, and when he possesses a person, there is usually violence.
Toussaint shook his head vehemently.
— I don’t know if I want this, he said. I felt good to begin with. Righteous. But we’ll have to kill so many if we want our freedom. Last night it was all I could do to stop the slaves killing my master. And he was never cruel to them.
The houngan nodded.
— Life must be paid for with death, he said.
He indicated the chair beside him, gestured for Toussaint to sit.
Toussaint did so, and he was aware that he had just lied, although he hadn’t intended to. He might not want to lead the rebellion, not precisely, but he knew that he would. It was his destiny. And who was to say that it wasn’t the very thing to possess him that would give him the strength to lead his people?
In his previous dream, he had been in a city like none he had ever seen before, with houses made from metal and people dressed in the clothes of lunatics. Yet he had known it was the future, and in that land blacks walked free everywhere and there were no whites that he could see. There, he was a boy, or he was in the dreams of the boy; he was not sure which. At the same time, he was himself. It was a strange sensation, one that had lingered long after he had woken, and even though he had forgotten much of his dream, he remembered one essential truth.
He knew that they were going to win, because the boy he had been in that strange future knew it was not right for one person to own another, not anymore. That was why Toussaint had no doubt that he would lead. No one else had the same conviction. No one else could pursue the cause knowing that it was not only just, but that it was possible.
The problem was that he didn’t necessarily want to. He had never killed anyone in his life, and he didn’t want to start now. He wanted to understand all sides of a conflict before he ever had to pick up a weapon.
— How do you feel, otherwise? the houngan said. What do you know of the thing that entered you? Because something did. I sensed it. We all sensed it.
— I like it, said Toussaint. That’s what scares me. And I can read! I could never read before.
The houngan nodded slowly.
— The lwa bring strange gifts, he said.
— I’m not sure if it is a lwa, said Toussaint. Is there a way to tell? Can you . . . examine me?
The houngan put out his hands.
— Give me your head, he said. Lean forward.
Toussaint inclined his forehead and felt the old man’s calloused hands gently cradle his head. Some time passed whilst the houngan made little noises of consideration. Finally he took a deep, deliberate breath, released it unevenly, and he let go.
— It doesn’t make sense, he said.
— What doesn’t?
— There is only one soul in you. There is only one you. It’s as if . . . as if there isn’t anything else. The houngan was talking to himself as much as to Toussaint. But I was there! I sensed you buckle, and be taken!
Toussaint stood up shakily.
— When I was a boy, a houngan said that I had half a soul. My twin sister died when we were young. The houngan told me about Marassa, said we had had power when we were together, but when my sister died the power was lost. My mother thought . . .
Toussaint had been about to speak of his twin sister, and how she had died, how it had made him feel, but he stopped. He did not want to speak of his life to the houngan. He kicked at his chair instead and sent it sprawling across the dirt floor.
— What should I do? he asked.
— I can’t tell you, said the houngan. Boukman says you’ll lead the people to freedom, but what do I know? I’m a blind man. The whites did that to me. So many of them will have to die. You said it yourself. So perhaps you should run to the mountains, live there with your son whilst the war wages. They may even win without you. Boukman says you’re indispensable . . . unique, but you seem an ordinary man to me. One soul, one nose, two eyes.
Toussaint trembled. He was thinking of the future, where he had walked through streets of black people living all together in their own homes. He was thinking of how in the future he had glimpsed he had been a boy, and the boy had known the name of Toussaint. He stepped over to the chair he had kicked and he righted it. He was startled to see the houngan standing right in front of him all of a sudden, with some kind of pipe in his mouth. He took it out, made a circle of his lips, and blew.
Smoke drifted toward Toussaint, curled around his face until he was standing in a gray fog.
He woke.
He was lying in bed in his cottage. Slaves had already begun to gather in the courtyard of the big house, in the fields, awaiting his word. Yet, to his surprise, de Libertas had been able to escape and his grand house still stood, not yet burned.
Toussaint stared at the ceiling and the grayness around him, and he thought hard. He did not want to kill the whites – it was true what he had told the houngan. He was filled with an overwhelming desire not for vengeance, but for justice. He saw a world that crushed people beneath its wheels, and he determined to take its reins and steer it onto sweeter ground.
It seemed to him, lying there, that there were three kinds of slaves, three kinds of people. There were those who were so filled with hate by their experience, by their oppression, that they snapped and destroyed property or people. There were those who were so filled with sadness by their experience that they snapped and destroyed themselves; someone would find them hanging in the barn, or lying in the field with slit wrists; Toussaint had been that someone several times, had found them like that. It made him cry, always. The third kind of person, though, was filled by their experience with a fierce longing for justice, a fierce desire to make things right in the world, to redress the balance.
In the darkness, Toussaint fancied that he was the third kind of person, and to fire his soul, to fill himself with a sense of the need for justice, he called up the faces that embodied for him slavery’s evil.
He lay there, and he remembered.
He remembered a baby.
This baby was not Toussaint’s; it belonged to a Chérie, a woman slave from the neighboring plantation. Or, rather, it didn’t belong to her – it belonged to her master, and this was the root of the problem. Toussaint had been fourteen when Chérie arrived one moonless night at the small cottage where he lived with his father. She knocked at the door in the dead of night, startling them both badly and making them think something terrible had occurred. It hadn’t, but it was about to.
Chérie had only just given birth and the baby was swaddled in rags she had torn from her own clothes. She had run, she told Toussaint’s father, because she knew that otherwise the baby would be taken from her and sold. Black babies were worth many hundreds of francs, because eventually they would become black slaves.
— How can it be my master’s? she said. He didn’t make her.
Toussaint’s father sighed.
— He owns you both, he said. It’s the way of things. If he had made her it might have been better. Then she would have been a mulat.
Toussaint frowned. This was perhaps the first true intimation he had received that slavery might be wrong. He had never thought about it too much before, but now he wondered how it could be right for a man to sell a woman’s baby.
— Please, said Chérie. Please, let us stay, just for tonight. The baby has a fever. I thought perhaps . . .
Toussaint’s father was skilled in the mixing of simples. It was well known throughout the province that he could help when a child was sickly or a man was dying. Now he threw up his hands and made a tutting noise, but he moved aside and let the woman in.
No more than an hour later, there was another knocking at the door. Toussaint peered through the window to see men with torches, some on horseback. The torches threw his own shadow long and spindly along the floorboards. When his father opened the door, the men shoved past him, knocking his head against the wall. On searching the cottage, they easily found Chérie and her baby and they dragged both outside. Bayou de Libertas was also there – Toussaint saw him – but he said nothing; he just sat there on his bay stallion, his lips pursed.
Chérie was crying. She begged for forgiveness, hugging the baby to her.
One of the men – the master of a neighboring plantation, a man named Coste – dismounted from his horse and tore the baby from her hands.
— You stole my property, he said.
Coste tossed the baby to a younger man, a black. One of his slaves.
— I intended to sell it, he said, but it seems that this woman requires a lesson in the principle of ownership.
He made a brusque gesture.
— Kill it.
The slave betrayed no hint of emotion as he grasped the baby by her ankles, upended her, and snapped her neck. The bones broke, percussively.
Chérie sank to her knees, wailing. She did not stop wailing. Toussaint had never heard such a sound; it was inhuman. It was a horrible scream that knew no reason. It was the sound of a person’s mind breaking, never to be whole again.
Coste turned to Toussaint and his father.
— Arrest that man, he said. For aiding and abetting a fugitive.
At this, Bayou spoke for the first time.
— No, he said. I’ve already permitted you to commit murder on my land, but I won’t permit you to take one of my slaves from me. I vouch for the man – he has a kind soul and cannot abide to see a woman in distress. I ask you to forgive him.
Coste grumbled at that, but he got up on his horse again and had one of his men tie a rope around Chérie’s ankles.
— Au revoir, Bayou, he said. Thank you for your assistance. I’ll return this bitch to her kennel now and hope that the discomfort of her journey teaches her the value of obedience.