Authors: Nick Lake
— We choose you!
— Lead us, Boukman! Command us to victory!
Boukman graciously waved their words away.
— No. The lwa will choose.
Toussaint sighed. Their cause was just. Hadn’t Rousseau himself said that man is born free, but everywhere is in chains? So Boukman had told him, anyway. The philosophers agreed that liberty was a right which could not be taken away, except as punishment for criminal acts. So could they not simply rise up, with justice in their hearts, and take their freedom by force? Was it necessary that they cement their alliance with this superstitious ceremony?
Toussaint glanced around at the gleaming, avid faces of his companions.
Yes, apparently it was.
Boukman raised a stone to his lips and kissed it. It was his pwen. In it was one of the gods the Dahomey had brought with them to this new world, a god of war called Ogou Ferro. Or so Boukman believed. After kissing the stone, he slipped it back into his pocket. Boukman believed the stone would protect him from those who wished to hurt him and would help him in times of need. Toussaint thought it was just a stone.
The ancient houngan stepped forward and, taking a stick, drew a symbol in the mud. Toussaint flinched at the man’s eyeless sockets. His master had ordered them to be put out when the houngan – who was called Louis, even though that wasn’t his true name – had dared to look upon his daughter in her underclothes. That the daughter had gone to the houngan to seduce him meant nothing to the master.
The old man’s blindness hardly diminished his skill at drawing the veve in the mud. The image was complicated: a pair of swords; several symmetrical curlicues; a shepherd’s crook.
Satisfied, the houngan raised the ason, a rattle filled with the tail bones of snakes, and began to shake it. Then, slow on his rickety old legs, he danced the Rada dance, foot to the side, left then right, to a one-two-three-rest count, his shoulders rolling back and forth. He was wildly waving a machete in his other hand.
Toussaint also held a machete, although it didn’t sit so easy in his hand. He hoped he would not have to use it. He had advised his master to quit the country when the mulats fell, as he had sensed – from Boukman, but also from the sullenness in the faces of all the slaves – that the negro uprising would swiftly follow. Yet Bayou had stayed, insisting that the commissioners would protect him, that even if the blacks obtained their freedom – which he believed, with certain caveats, that they one day should – the issue would be decided civilly, with no bloodshed. Toussaint believed the opposite. He believed that the slaves would have their freedom, but they would needs soak the land in the blood of the slavers to achieve it, and this was a prospect that filled Toussaint with sadness.
The houngan sang. He sang so that Legba of the crossroad might open the gate, and the lwa might flow down into him when he needed them:
— Attibon Legba, ouvri bayè pou moin!
Ago!
Ou wè, Attibon Legba, ouvri bayè pou moin, ouvri bayè!
M’apè rentrè quand ma tournè,
Ma salut lwa yo.
Boukman came to stand next to Toussaint.
— You doubt the necessity of this, he whispered.
— I doubt the wisdom of it, said Toussaint, not bothering to keep his voice down. The whites believe us to be super stitious and unschooled. We’re proving them right.
Boukman waved his hand dismissively.
— We’re proving ourselves African. If we take the whites’ religion and their education, then we’ll only ever be free on their terms.
Toussaint nodded slowly. He didn’t agree, but he could appreciate Boukman’s reasoning.
He was becoming distracted as the dancing of the houngan grew wilder. Toussaint told himself he was imagining it, but it seemed that the very trees were dancing, their broad leaves waving back and forth in a breeze that had just arisen, as if the land had awoken and were breathing. Shadows licked across the sluggish waters like dark flames.
— He’s calling Ogou now, said Boukman. Do you feel it?
Toussaint shook his head. But he wasn’t convinced he did not. Did it seem that the low long shapes of the alligators had drifted closer, that the trees were hemming them in? All of a sudden the moon seemed close over the water, fat and sickly pale, and there was a smell all around him of organic richness, of the dark soil where dead things rot, of freshly uprooted plants, of crawling things squirming in their roots.
— Ogou is the father of war, said Boukman. In the country of our fathers they say, deye morne ga morne; deye feu ga feu.
Behind the mountain is another mountain; behind the fire is another fire.
Ogou is the mountain. Ogou is the fire. Do you understand?
— No, said Toussaint.
Boukman studied him a moment.
— You will.
The houngan, still dancing, scuffed out the veve of Legba, the lwa who opened the doors to the spirit world, and began to draw a new shape. This one showed a mountain, a fire, a sword.
He danced quicker and quicker, wailing:
—
Papa Ogou qui gagn yun cheval!
Toute moune pas montè’l!
Papa Ogou qui gagn yun cheval!
Toute moune pas montè’l!
Toussaint, who had previously been present only at Rada rites, and never the fierce, secret Petwa ceremonies for the war gods, listened to the words of the houngan’s new song.
Papa Ogou rides a horse. It’s not just anyone who can ride him
. He knew that the vodou worshippers believed the lwa could take over a man’s body by crossing from the land under the waters and possessing the man’s master spirit, his met tet. He had seen a female slave become Papa Gede, the father of death. Her voice had deepened and she had drunk a bottle of moonshine, then breathed out fire.
It had been impressive, but was no less a pantomime for it.
Toussaint glanced at Boukman.
Does he truly believe in this?
he wondered.
Or does he merely intend to claim possession by Ogou himself, and so cement his leadership?
He was still wondering this when something plucked his spine at both ends and pulled it taut as a piano string, causing his head to snap back and his teeth to clack together on his tongue. His mouth flooded with blood, but he couldn’t taste it and there was no pain.
He was dimly aware of darkness rushing in, and of blood and spittle spraying from his lips.
As if through water, he heard the houngan singing more urgently now:
— Ogou Badagry, c’est neg politique, yo!
A la li la, oh, corde coupe corde, oh!
Ou maît allè, ou maît tourney
Ogou Badagry c’est la li ye!
Ogou is here
, Toussaint understood.
The master is returned.
Where?
he
wondered.
Where is Ogou?
Toussaint felt something hot on his arm. It could have been a match, or it could have been a burning tree, but he seemed to have a sense neither of the shape of things, nor of the extent of his own body anymore. His head was in the heavens and his feet were in the sea under the world. At the same time, he was the size of a cockroach, looking up at the world through refracted lenses, a creature in miniature surrounded by giants. He tried to turn, but could only roll his eyes to the side.
Boukman was grinning at him, grinning and grinning, and Toussaint could see the skull under his skin.
Then something snapped, and he . . .
In the darkness I can’t tell when I’m dreaming and when I’m just thinking. I hear the dead hand beside me scrabbling, scrabbling at the floor. For a moment, I’m scared. Then I think, well, at least I’m not alone.
But I realize it was probably just the rat, come back to gnaw on the dead people again.
I see people coming through the walls, pulling the concrete apart with their bare hands, coming to rescue me. I’m pretty sure they’re not real cos I see them, and it’s not possible to see anything real in here – it’s too black. But they seem real, these people, with their strong hands and their smiling faces.
I’m hallucinating, I know this. Do I? I’m seeing shit that isn’t there. I’ve taken drugs before – everyone does in the Site – so I know what it feels like. Maybe I even dreamed those people calling?
My mouth has grown enormous again. Hours or days ago I had to pee and I collected the liquid in my hands, as much as I could, and I drank it.
Oh, Manman. Look at me now. You told me I would get what was coming to me.
At some point I close my eyes. Suddenly I’m drifting up, up through the half-fallen ceiling, the concrete flesh of the building skeletoned with rods of steel, and then further through floors upon floors of twisted metal and bodies, and then up into the sky. It’s light out here. I can see the hospital below me. It’s so broken that it doesn’t look man-made at all; it’s just a pile of random blocks.
I’m in the clouds. I think, maybe I am magical, maybe I am still Marassa, even if my sister is gone. In the Site, ever since we were born, people said we were special. They said we were Marassa, and that gave us powers to change the world. They said we had been given life by Aristide, and so the spirit of the people and the revolution was in us.
Even after Marguerite was taken from us, people said these things. They said that Dread Wilmè had died to protect my life, so all that rebellion had been made even stronger, like when you put carbon into iron and it makes it harder, makes it steel. Some even said that Dread Wilmè lived inside me, and they would look at me strangely as I walked down the street.
I thought that was stupid, but now I think, maybe it’s not so stupid after all.
I can see the whole of Port-au-Prince – the palace, the homes of the rich, the open-air prison of Site Solèy. It’s all collapsed. The palace is just dust and rubble, the homes are destroyed. Only Site Solèy looks the same, and that’s cos Site Solèy was a ruin to begin with.
There’s a gull beside me in the clouds. It peers at me, and banks and screams. I can see planes circling above the airport, and helicopters flying back and forth above the city. There are people crawling over the wrecked hospital below me, like little ants in hard hats.
Earthquake
, I think, cos it’s the only thing that could smash everything up like this. When we were little, my sister and me, we would make cities out of the mud in the gutters of Site Solèy, and then we would say we were dinosaurs or earthquakes and stomp those cities to nothing.
The devastation I pictured in my head never got close to this, though. From above, Haiti looks like it’s been wiped off the earth by an angry god. Maybe Dread Wilmè
was
made into a zombi, and he’s come back to punish the land and has shaken everything to pieces in his anger.
I wonder if I can fly, and I try to bank toward the palace to get a better look. But I can’t move where I want. Suddenly I’m rising again, up, up among the clouds and then bursting through them, and it’s like the flattened city had never been there; I’m in clear blue sky above soft white clouds and it goes on forever.
Then I’m descending very fast. It’s night-time now, which seems strange and at the same time not strange. I must have flown far over the clouds, cos I’m not above the city, either; I’m looking down on marshland, dense with trees. There are no electric lights, though I can see a tentative, reddish light on the other side of the trees, flickering like bloody water, which must be torches or candles.
My speed increases. I’m breaking through the treetops now and I see that there are people below; they’re standing in a circle and looking very intently at a man who’s dancing and singing like a mad person. They turn from him and look at another man – he’s big and tall and wildly ugly, his nose sort of squashed and swollen. He’s leaning back, screaming, it seems to me, looking straight up at me as I hurtle downward. I just have time to see that he’s foaming at the mouth – he’s having some kind of fit – then his mouth is getting bigger and bigger, like mine did when I was so thirsty, and his mouth takes over the world, like mine did, contains it within its twisted and blackened teeth, its diseased gums, and I’m inside it and I’m sinking, sinking into the darkness.
Toussaint looked at Boukman’s concerned features and tried to work out what was wrong. It took him a while to discern that the angle between his eyes and the man’s face was awry – that he was, in fact, lying flat on his back. He raised a hand for help and Boukman seized it, pulling him to his feet.
— You were chosen, said Boukman.
— Pardon? said Toussaint.
He wasn’t sure how he had ended up on the ground but, now that he was on his feet again, he found that he was looking around him with something like satisfaction and something like equanimity. He felt like he belonged in this place, like he would be comfortable speaking to any of these people, like this was his land and it would support his feet no matter what tried to upset his balance.
That’s usual, isn’t it?
He had the strange feeling that he had always been incomplete until this very moment.