Authors: William Dietrich
She pulled me like filings to a magnet.
Now I was sure I was hearing the pounding of drums from deep within the swamp. I was going, I guessed, to some kind of religious or political ceremony, similar perhaps to the one in Boukman Wood that had initiated this revolution. Lightly this woodland sprite led me toward the noise, slowing if I needed to catch up, floating out of reach if I came too near. I was sweating with excitement and apprehension. Who was she?
What you seek
, suddenly echoed in my brain.
We came to a clearing, a small barren island of damp ground in a swampy wilderness. In the middle was a small hut of thatch and sticks from which a single candle glowed. My guide stopped at the far edge of this isle. She pointed at the dim hut. Clearly I was to enter. Would she follow? But no, she dissolved into shadow, and I felt intense disappointment. I was left to enter on my own.
Hesitantly I stepped forward, set aside my lantern, and stooped, poking my head into the hut as nervously as if putting it under the guillotine blade.
The structure was as primitive as my mental picture of Africa, its dome a weave of fronds and rushes. The floor was dirt. The candle burned on a small altar just one foot high, covered with a red-checkered cloth so I couldn’t see whether it was made of wood or rock. A goblet in the middle of this tabernacle held what appeared to be clear water, and four smooth river stones held down the cloth at the corners. On one side of the goblet was a human skull, and on the other a scattering of flowers. There was also a little heap of seashells.
Well, it was exotic, but there was actually nothing more ominous about this collection than the display in a Masonic Lodge. Certainly I didn’t feel the kind of religious menace I’d experienced with the Egyptian Rite.
“The symbol for Ezili Danto is the red-checkered heart.”
I looked into the hut’s shadows. Against the opposite wall floated the illuminated face of an aged crone, her skin leather-colored in the candlelight. Her age was not evident in the creasing of her face—in fact, her countenance seemed remarkably smooth, if mottled—but her long years were betrayed in the wispiness of her gray hair and eyes sunk like stones in dough, their depths holding wisdom that comes only from time and hard experience. Her parted lips showed the tip of her tongue, as if testing the air for scent like a serpent. This, I guessed, was Cecile Fatiman, the famed
mambo
of revolution.
“I’m something of a student of religious symbolism. My wife more so. And the flowers?”
“Ezili’s. She is flower herself.”
“The water?”
“Purity of life. The stones anchor the four directions.” Cecile’s voice signified approval; she liked my curiosity.
“And the shells?”
“Cast to divine the future. To see your coming, Ethan Gage.”
I crouched in the entrance, not certain what I was supposed to do.
“You didn’t bring your sorceress wife with you,” she continued in her husky French. It was half reprimand and half question. “The shells talked of her as well.”
“She was taken from me by an evil Frenchman.”
“And now you come to us, the white who needs the blacks.”
“Yes. I’m seeking information to win back my son as well. The same information can help you.”
“You mean my people.”
“The revolutionaries of Haiti. You are Cecile, yes?”
“But of course. Sit.” She gestured to a spot near the entry. The hut was no bigger than a small tent. I crowded in and crossed my legs. Sitting, my head almost brushed the rush dome. The candle was red as blood, the wax melting down the edges of the altar like rivulets of lava.
“Can you help me?” I asked.
“Perhaps the
loa
can help you. You know what
loa
are?”
“Gods, or spirits.”
“They speak to believers.”
“Then I will try to believe. I’m not as good at it as my wife.”
“The
loa
speak through the power that animates all true religions. Do you know what that power is, seeker?”
“Faith?”
“Love.”
The hardest thing to earn, and give. I was silent.
“Only love has the power to ward off evil. Without it, we are damned. Now. Drink this.” She handed me a wooden bowl filled with cool liquid that smelled rancid. “It will help you listen and see.”
“What is it?”
“Wisdom, white man. Drink.”
I sipped, confirming its bitterness. I hesitated.
“Do you think wisdom should be sweet?” she asked.
What you seek.
I shrugged and downed it all, almost gagging. What choice did I have? There was no point in poisoning me; they could kill me in a thousand simpler ways. They might drug me, but for what? So I swallowed, gasping, its taste of bitter vines, cobwebs, and grave liners.
I grimaced and handed the bowl back.
She laughed softly. Half her teeth were gone.
“Are you really more than a hundred years old?” I asked, fighting back bile.
“A slave has no name of her own, a slave has no birth of her own. A slave just is. So I count my age from what I remember the French say went on in the world as I grew. Yes, I see more and remember more than anyone. I go back a century, maybe more.” She laughed softly again.
My stomach lurched, and settled. I began to feel drunk, but in a very odd way. My body tingled, not unpleasantly but unnaturally, and the candlelight oscillated. Yes, drugs. I would see
loa
, all right. Was that the intention?
“I’m looking for stories about a treasure you may know about, but only to share after using it to win my family back.” I had to work to sustain my concentration. “If you help me, your people can keep the loot before the British or French get it. You can build your country. And I will help you take Cap-François from Rochambeau.”
“What treasure?”
“Montezuma’s.”
She smiled. “If I knew of treasure, wouldn’t I have it by now?” She cackled at her own joke. Her face seemed to melt and reform in the candlelight. I saw now that she was a round woman, well fed, swathed neck to ankle in a patterned dress, colors muted in the dark. Her nose was flat and wide, and her nails long on fingers as gnarled as driftwood.
“I don’t know.” I felt confused. “L’Ouverture told my wife a secret. The British believe your people may know more. I only hope.”
“You saw Toussaint alive?”
“I saw him killed. I was trying to rescue him. He was very sick.”
“Napoleon killed him.” She turned and spat into the dirt, a dark glob that suddenly seemed as menacing as serpent venom. “A man like Napoleon, he accumulates many curses.”
“Great men attract great enemies.”
She drank from the bowl herself, slurping, gave a sigh, and put it down, dragging her hand across her mouth. “And what did L’Ouverture tell you, Ethan Gage? The
loa
said you would come to us from across the sea with word of our hero Toussaint.”
My tongue was thickening from the drink. “That the emeralds were in the diamond.”
She frowned, disappointed. “I do not know what that means.”
My own spirits dropped. “I was sure you would! You’re the wisest
mambo
.”
“There are stories. The escaped slaves who hid in the jungle are called Maroons, and there were always tales that some of them had found a great treasure and hid it, for reasons unknown. But no one remembers where it was stowed. And no one has ever mentioned a diamond. No treasure has appeared.”
“L’Ouverture was sick. Could he have been raving?”
She considered, then shrugged. “But the
loa
, the spirits, they know. You want to understand what L’Ouverture told your wife, American?”
“Of course.”
“Then come. You must dance with Ezili Danto, the dark seductress of wood and water.”
I
backed out of the hut, and Cecile ponderously followed. She picked up my lantern and waddled toward the sound of the drums. Once more, I followed. She was as sure as my other guides in twisting through the maze of land and water, but much slower, and she stopped sometimes to wheeze, insects droning in time to her breaths. I waited uneasily, feeling I’d been brought on a test, not an invitation.
The wood throbbed with sound.
“I feel things watching us,” I said.
“Just
baka
,” she dismissed. “Small monster.”
“Small
what
?”
“They watch in the night.
Diab
, too. Devils. Don’t let them take you.”
“And how am I to do that?”
“Stay on the right path. You are in Haiti now.”
What you seek.
I followed so close her skirt brushed my ankles. The forest seemed malevolent, as if I’d stepped through a portal into an underworld. I’d sense something watching or creeping and whirl around, but there was never anything I could see.
Cecile cackled softly.
I finally spied firelight through the leaves, and I knew we were coming to the source of the drumming. Our damp trail broadened to a beaten lane bordered by two rows of poles like lampposts. I glanced up at what I first thought were flowers or ribbons decorating the posts’ tops. But no, black roosters dangled upside down, the throats of each one neatly cut and drained.
“The poor will eat tomorrow,” Cecile said.
We entered an open-air church, the swamp trees a cathedral wall, the ceiling a cone-shaped thatch roof. At this peristyle’s center, jutting toward the roof’s peak, was a stout phallic pole fifteen feet high. At least a hundred people lined the periphery of this temple, focused on the pole the way a Philadelphia congregation would be focused on an altar. A fire pit illuminated dark faces. The celebrants swayed to a mesmerizing drumbeat. The music came from four male drummers opposite our entry, their instruments flared at the top, narrow at the bottom, and made of hide stretched over jungle wood. Other musicians had flattened bells, bamboo flutes, and wooden triangles. The rhythm pumped like a heart.
“Now you see voodoo,” said Cecile. “This is the oldest religion. It comes from when man was born.” She took a gourd shaped like a rattle and shook it, and I could hear seeds inside. “This is an
ason
. I must consecrate this place for Ezili.”
She moved around the perimeter of the peristyle, acknowledging the greetings of robed worshippers by shaking her instrument while they bowed. They set a beat with their feet, the ceremony as electric as if charged by the generator I’d once built at Acre. The air itself seemed to prickle. My own senses were heightened, as if I could hear distant whispers and see in the dark.
Cecile accepted a pitcher of what I assumed was holy water. This was offered to the four compass points, and then poured three times: once at the post, once at the peristyle’s entrance, and once, oddly, at my feet. Was I some sort of sacrifice? Cecile spoke in slave Creole, the crowd answering, and I followed only a few words. Sometimes I thought I heard a name of one of the voodoo gods that Astiza had mentioned to me, memories of old Africa scrambled with stories of the Catholic saints: Mawu, Bosu, Damballah, Simbi, Sogbo, Ogu. The old woman stooped stiffly and began sketching patterns on the dirt floor. If Communion is designed to bring Christ into the souls of its participants, I guessed these drawings were designed to bring voodoo gods into the assembly.
Just what I was doing here I still didn’t know, but the drums were slowly accelerating, the swaying of the celebrants becoming more pronounced. Finally they began to dance and chant, moving in a circle in serpentlike undulation. They sipped from bowls as I had, and responded in chorus to Creole calls from Cecile. The dances were stately and intricate, not savage or erotic, and choreographed as carefully as the cotillion I’d just seen in the Government House of Rochambeau.
Black hands tugged at me, and I hesitantly joined the circulation, not dancing exactly but swaying as best I could, feeling clumsy and conspicuous. My companions, however, smiled at my attempt. Another bowl was offered, and I drank the bitter broth, just to be polite. I found the taste not quite as acrid this time, but my mouth was growing numb. I was thirsty, and drank more.
Time ceased, or rather my perception of it. I’d no sense how long we danced except that it seemed both a moment and an eternity, and the melody permeated so deeply that I felt myself
becoming
music. The noise was a bridge between our realm and the supernatural, and did indeed invite spirits from another world.
The crowd suddenly parted, as if pushed by an invisible force, and a new figure stepped onto the stamped floor of the temple. I stumbled and gaped. It was my earlier hooded guide, the elusive woman of the swamps, except that now the hood was down and her luxuriant dark hair cascaded to her waist. She stepped toward the central post with the grace of a doe, eyes large and dark, lips sensuous, neck high, gaze transfixing. There was something animal about her, human but wild, uninhibited, skittish.
“Ezili,” the crowd murmured.
She could not really be a goddess; it was a young woman playing the part. Except that in my inebriated condition she did seem to float instead of walk, and glow with translucence instead of blocking the light. When she reached out to touch the central pillar, a spark seemed to flash between flesh and wood, and I jumped. I was transfixed, hypnotized, reason gone and emotion roaring.
Women, as Jubal had observed, make me stupid.
This creature put her back to the post and rotated her head to smile at all of us, but especially me. At least I thought her attention was focused on me. I gaped, trying to remember dignity. Astiza was beautiful, but this woman was beyond beauty; she was luminous as a Madonna, polished as a marble saint, delicate as Venetian glass. Her complexion was mulatto but with a golden tint, reminding me of amber, or celestial honey, its flow somehow explaining the languid precision of her movements. All her features were perfect, in an almost unnatural way, which attracted and repelled at the same time. Ezili seemed like an idol forbidden to human touch. Her smile was dazzling, and when she lifted her arms above her head and planted one foot on the post to lean back, the pose lifted her breasts, arched her back, and emphasized her unworldly sublimity. Where had they found this damsel? But perhaps she really wasn’t a girl at all but truly Ezili in the flesh! Or, at least Ezili as I might imagine her after three bowls of Cecile’s broth. I couldn’t look away. Now her shift seemed artfully draped by an erotic sculptor, toga folds as light and fine as spider silk.