Authors: Nick Lake
He turned to Jean-Christophe, who was the most agile man he knew, and a clever one.
— You’ll go through the sugar cane, he said. Skirt around the house, and avoid the windows. Head for the woodshed if you can – it’ll be at the rear of the building; the whites can’t stand having things like that on display. They’ll be watching the track, I’m sure of it. They won’t see you coming.
— Then what? said Jean-Christophe.
— Set it alight, said Toussaint.
We’ll be waiting for them to come out.
A large man, who had distinguished himself as a fighter but showed a streak of terrible cruelty, stepped forward. Toussaint thought his name might be Matthieu.
— And then? he said. You want us to let them go again?
Toussaint ran his hand through his hair.
— No, he said. These ones you can kill.
I wish I could hear somebody talking. I wish I could hear Manman one more time. I remember when it was her shouting that made me come out of the darkness into the real world.
After I got shot, Manman waited till the soldiers had gone and then she carried me to the nearest checkpoint. She left Dread Wilmè there in the street, dead, where the MINUSTAH troops had abandoned him. They weren’t mad, those guys. They were willing to kill the man – they had the balls for that – and guaranteed they were going to take some bullets for it, but they knew that take Dread out of the Site and they would have a fucking revolution on their hands. It wasn’t worth it. Not only that but Dread was reputed to eat babies, man, and they’d seen him walk down the street with a thousand bullet holes in him. The white soldiers, the blancs, they didn’t want that vodou with them.
Manman, though, she was pissed that they had left me behind. I was a child, bleeding; she thought that even in a war people should not leave children wounded in the street. She was afraid that I was going to die, and then she would be left with nobody.
I woke up again when I heard the shouting. I opened my eyes and I was in her arms. I wasn’t light then, I was, like, 50 kilos or something. She had carried me all the way to where the street was blocked off by an orange shipping container and there was a barrier across the road. Sweat was beading on her face and her eyes were huge, they were so close to me. Everything was kind of bleached and washed out, and I was aware of the smell of my own blood. Casques-bleus were pointing guns at us and they were doing some of the shouting.
Manman was shouting, too, but not at the soldiers. She was ignoring them, and instead walking toward these people with cameras, with no uniforms, who were on the other side of the barrier. The soldiers were holding these people back, but they were squeezing past and taking pictures of us. I could see the flashes going off and they made my head spin even more. This was, like, dawn. There was a little light in the sky, like blood seeping from a wound, but not much.
The people with the cameras, I figured they were journalists. They were shouting and shouting – in English, I think. Manman didn’t speak English, but she shouted in Kreyòl and she shouted in the broken French that she knew. She shouted:
— My son was shot by MINUSTAH soldiers in the slum.
She shouted:
— He was shot during a military operation to kill Dread Wilmè. Dread Wilmè is dead and my son is injured. Help me.
One of the reporters broke away from the group and turned to the soldiers. He thrust a video camera forward.
— Can you confirm that Dread Wilmè has been killed? he asked.
The soldier backed away, looking nervous.
Manman didn’t stop shouting. She walked closer and closer to the barrier, and the soldiers were backing away from her now, unsure how to proceed.
— Please, she said. Please, let me through. Let my son have treatment. Please. You shot him, now just take him to the hospital.
All of this, the reporters were filming and taking photos of it. The flashes, they were a bit like guns going off, and they made me think I was going to be sick, or faint again. I didn’t, but I kind of wished I would.
— We heard gunshots from inside Site Solèy after seeing vehicles enter there from the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, said one of the reporters in French. We also saw a helicopter. Did you shoot this boy?
She asked this young soldier near her, but really she was asking all the soldiers, and she was talking for the camera, too.
I saw one of them, who seemed a bit older than the rest, turn away and talk quietly and quickly into a walkie-talkie. The others had their fingers on their triggers, and not all the guns were pointing at us; some of them were pointing at the reporters. Manman, she was smart. She wasn’t even looking at the soldiers; she was talking to the reporters the whole time, showing them the wound in my leg, telling them what happened.
— I saw Dread Wilmè die with my own eyes, she said. They filled him with so many bullets you could pick him up with a magnet.
The reporters were pressing forward then, trying to get into the Site, and the barrier was straining against them. One tried to duck under and a soldier brandished his gun, shouting. I think someone could have got shot right then, but at that moment the soldier on his walkie-talkie stepped forward and put a hand on the barrel of the gun.
— Let the woman and the boy through, he said to the men who were manning the barrier. Escort them to Canapé-Vert for treatment.
The reporters went quiet, then they were all shouting at once:
— Does this mean you confirm the death of Dread Wilmè at the hands of MINUSTAH troops?
— Can you . . . ?
— Do you . . . ?
— What is the status of Dread Wilmè?
— Did you shoot this boy?
The soldiers raised the barrier, and Manman moved through. Now she was ignoring the reporters completely, and it was like they didn’t exist anymore.
— No comment, said the soldier with the walkie-talkie. No comment.
Toussaint looked down on the bay of Cape Town through the spyglass. He saw three fat-bellied ships, wallowing in the deep water. He and Jean-Christophe were up on a hill above the town, whilst the majority of the body of freed slaves still camped in the mountains near Dondon. Not all the rebel forces were Toussaint’s yet, but he had faith that they soon would be.
He found that he was compelled to work deep into the nights in order to avoid sleep. For when he slept the dreams would come, and he would turn into a young man in a strange version of Haiti, where the blacks were free, but seemed to be imprisoned still in a city of shaky houses, encircled by soldiers. In this nightmare world there was loud music, with the insistent, repetitive beats of a vodou ceremony, and there were strange signs and lights that burned bright as the noonday sun, even at night. There were so many odd sights and sounds that he always woke feeling dizzy and disoriented, despite this world seeming familiar to him, as if part of him belonged there.
Other nights, he was not in this city, but in a small black space, like a cave, and it seemed that the world was pressing itself down on him. He was convinced that no one would rescue him and that he was going to die. He screamed, but there was no one to hear.
What if it was something terrible that entered me at Bois Caiman?
he wondered.
What if it’s hell I’m seeing in my visions?
These thoughts troubled Toussaint, but his people needed him. He should have been back there in the mountains, training the troops, ensuring that the land was being cultivated as he had planned, drawing maps to show how the country could be managed once it was fully in their hands. And he had done these things tirelessly for the past several months. He also wanted to be where Isaac was. His son was sixteen now, practically a man. But he was no soldier, and that wasn’t merely because Toussaint did not want to see him die. Isaac was a sensitive boy, intelligent, a smooth speaker and a reader of books. He was better off – safer – in the mountains.
However, he had heard of these ships that had sailed all the way from France and wanted to see them for himself. So, leaving his son in the safety of the hills, he had brought a small detachment, the finest amongst his troops, to camp just above Cape Town and observe what the French were plotting. The other two generals, Jean-François and Biassou, thought him a madman to travel all the way to Cape Town.
— The commissioners have given us our freedom, they said. We’ve achieved our goal.
Certainly, this was true. The commissioners had surrendered to the black troops, and the island was theirs inasmuch as it was now a free republic of whites and blacks, no longer subject to France. This had been an ecstatic moment, the culmination of all they had fought for. Toussaint himself had taken delivery of the document in which, in formal language and precise copperplate script, the commissioner had confirmed the freedom and victory of the slaves. It had been as light and as fragile as any other sheaf of paper, although every letter was written in blood and behind every word were dead men.
But it was in vain that Toussaint tried to explain that what the commissioners did and said was of less import than the beatings of a fly against a windowpane. The commissioners might be white, but they were not French, not truly, for in the most part they had not been born on French soil. When they arrived, the authentic French would take the freedom of the blacks that the commissioners had declared and they would wipe their white arses with it.
Biassou and Jean-François hoped they could simply throw off the yoke of slavery and be happy for evermore. It didn’t occur to them that the French were already plotting how they could take the freedom of the blacks back, and bury it with the bodies of those who resisted. Now, particularly because Boukman was dead, it was Toussaint who had to think about crops, and governance, and what happened when the slavers wanted their land back. It was Toussaint who had to think about justice and order. It was Toussaint who had to think about the various negotiations still to be concluded with the commissioners. Amongst those, and chief in his mind, was the release of the many black prisoners they held – some taken before the uprising for a litany of feeble pretexts, some captured in the course of the fighting. As long as those prisoners remained in jail, and the commissioners remained in power, Toussaint did not consider the slaves entirely free, no matter what the commissioners said.
He sighed, feeling sweat trickle from his forehead into his eyes. The hill they were on had never been cultivated, so it offered the cover of thick vegetation. Broad leaves concealed them from below, and granted them a little protection from the fierce sun. Toussaint knew that all on Haiti were slaves to the sun – it burned the backs of owners and workers alike.
He lowered the spyglass and took in the entirety of the view – he still had good eyesight despite his age. These three French ships must have set sail from France as soon as news of the slave rebellion arrived on her shores. To the naked eye, they didn’t look so large. They were dwarfed by Cape Town, a shambolic port that hugged the bay with sprawling spiky arms. Many of the houses were grand, in the French style, but there was also an embarrassment of wooden structures, little shacks and houses that clustered on the flanks of the hills like barnacles on a whale’s side. He clicked his tongue against his palate, thinking of the French envoy, seemingly stuck on that ship of his.
— You’re sure he didn’t land? he asked.
Jean-Christophe nodded.
— The French envoy left his ship once, on a rowing boat. He reached the shore and the commissioners met him, but they must have sent him back. There were several armed men with them and the envoy didn’t look happy about it.
Toussaint considered this for a moment, glad he had sent Jean-Christophe ahead of him.
— The spirit of revolution has reached these commissioners, too, he said. They think to themselves, perhaps
we
should own Haiti. They think to themselves, perhaps we should no longer bow to a government half the world away. The whites want to be free, too.
— They deny the power of France, said Jean-Christophe. It’s madness on their part.
Toussaint shook his head.
— No. They deny the power of the Revolutionary government in France. Who’s to say the monarchy won’t be resurrected in France, and these commissioners won’t be ennobled for resisting the Republican usurpers?
The three ships below did not fly the king’s colors – they flew the tricolor flag that stood for the Republic. In France, only recently, the king had been deposed, his head cut off, and an assembly had taken his place. It was one of the events that had convinced Boukman, and others like him, that it was time to assert their independence from the slavers.
Toussaint could almost admire the risk the Haitian commissioners were taking. They were refusing permission for the French government’s ships to disembark – if the new Republic did not fall, it would go badly for them. Galbaud, the envoy on board the largest of those ships, had been sent by France to take control of Haiti and to enslave the blacks once more. He would not take kindly to being imprisoned on his own vessel.
Well
, Toussaint thought.
Let the French and the commissioners fight amongst themselves
.
It will make my task easier.