Island Beneath the Sea (21 page)

The drums began to talk and answer, to set the rhythm for the ceremony. The
hounsis
danced around the
poteau-mitan,
moving like flamingos, crouching, rising up, long necks, winged arms, and they sang calling to the
loas,
first Legba, as is always done, then the rest, one by one. The
mambo,
Tante Rose, traced the
veve
around the sacred post with a mixture of flour to feed the
loas,
and ash to honor the dead. The drums augmented her purpose, the rhythm grew faster, and the whole forest throbbed, from the deepest roots to the most remote stars. Then Ogoun descended with the spirit of war, Ogu-Fer, the virile god of weapons, aggressive, irritable, dangerous, and Erzulie released Tante Rose to make way for Ogoun to mount her. Everyone saw the transformation. Tante Rose rose straight up to double her size, with neither lameness nor years on her back
;
with her eyes rolled back, she made an astounding leap and landed nearly ten feet away before one of the fires. From Ogoun's mouth came a bellow of thunder and the
loa
danced, rising up from the ground, falling, and bouncing back like a ball, with the strength of the
loas,
accompanied by the roar of the drums. Two men approached, the most courageous, to give him sugar to calm him, but the
loa
picked them up like rag dolls and threw them far from him. He had come to give a message of war and justice and blood. Ogoun picked up a red hot coal, placed it in his mouth, whirled completely about, sucking fire, and then spit it out without burning his lips. Then he took a large knife from the man nearest him, set the
asson
on the ground, went to the sacrificial black pig tied to a tree, and with his warrior's arm cut its throat with a single slash, severing the thick head from the trunk and soaking himself in its blood. By then many followers had been mounted, and the forest had filled with Invisibles, Morts, and Mysteres, with
loas
and spirits mixed in with humans, all scrambled together, singing, dancing, leaping, and rolling to the beat of the drums, walking on burning coals, licking red hot knife blades, and eating handfuls of hot chilis. The night air was charged as it is during a terrible storm, but not a breeze stirred. The torches made a light like midday, but the nearby
marechaussee
saw nothing. This is how they told it.

Much later, when the huge crowd was shaking like a single person, Ogoun loosed a lion's roar to impose silence. The drums immediately stilled, and all except the
mambo
were again themselves as the
loas
retired to the tops of the trees. Ogu-Fer lifted the
asson
toward the sky, and the voice of the most powerful
loa
issued from Tante Rose's mouth to demand the end of slavery, to call for a total rebellion, and to name the chiefs
:
Boukman, Jean-Francois, Jeannot, Boisseau, Celestin, and several others. Toussaint was not named, because at that moment the man who would become the soul of the rebels was at a plantation in Breda, where he served as coachman. He did not join the uprising until several weeks later, after he had put his master's entire family in a safe place. I did not hear Toussaint's name until a year later.

That was the beginning of the revolution. Many years have gone by and blood keeps running, soaking the soil of Haiti, but I am not there to weep.

Revenge

A
s soon as he learned about the uprising of the slaves and the affair of the prisoners in Limbe, all of whom died without confessing, Toulouse Valmorain ordered Tete to quickly prepare the return to Saint-Lazare, ignoring everyone's warnings, especially those of Dr. Parmentier, about the danger whites were running on the plantations. "Do not exaggerate, Doctor. The blacks have always been rebellious. Prosper Cambray has them under control," Valmorain replied emphatically, although he had doubts. While the echo of the drums was resonating in the north, calling the slaves to the meeting at Bois Cayman, Valmorain's coach, protected by a reinforced guard, headed at a trot for the plantation. They arrived in a cloud of dust, hot, anxious, with the children swooning and Tete jarred by the tossing and bumping of the vehicle. The master leaped from the carriage and closed himself in his office with his head overseer to receive a report of losses, which in fact were minimal, and then look around the property and confront the slaves that according to Cambray had revolted, but not enough to hand them over to the
marechaussee
, as he had done with others. It was the kind of situation that made Valmorain feel inadequate, and that in recent times had been repeated frequently. The overseer looked after the interests of Saint-Lazare better than the owner; he acted with firmness and few inhibitions, while Valmorain vacillated, little disposed to dirty his hands with blood. Once again he confirmed his own ineptitude. In the twenty-some years he had been in the colony he had not adapted; he continued to have the sensation he was only passing through, and his most disagreeable burden was the slaves. He was not capable of ordering a man to be roasted over a slow fire, though Cambray considered that measure indispensable. His argument with the overseer and the
grands blancs
, since he had had to justify his position on more than one occasion, was that cruelty turned out to be ineffective; the slaves disabled or destroyed what they could, from knife edges to their own health; they committed suicide or ate carrion and wasted away vomiting and shitting, extremes that he attempted to avoid. He wondered whether his considerations served any purpose, or if he was hated as much as Lacroix. Perhaps Parmentier was right, and violence, fear, and hatred were inherent in slavery, but a planter could not allow himself the luxury of scruples. On the rare occasions he went to bed sober he couldn't sleep, tormented by visions. His family's fortune, begun by his father and multiplied several times over by him, was soaked in blood. Unlike other
grands blancs
, he could not ignore the voices rising in Europe and America in denunciation of the hell on Antillean plantations.

By the end of September, the rebellion was widespread in the north; slaves were running away en masse and as they left setting fire to everything. There were not enough workers in the fields, and the planters did not want to keep buying slaves who ran at the first moment of inattention. The slave market in Le Cap was nearly paralyzed. Prosper Cambray doubled the number of commandeurs and carried vigilance and discipline to the extreme, while Valmorain succumbed to his employee's ferocity without intervening. On Saint-Lazare no one slept soundly. Life, which was never undemanding, became pure suffering.
Kalendas
were forbidden and rest hours as well, although in the suffocating heat of midday little work was done. Ever since Tante Rose had disappeared there was no one to act as healer, to give counsel or spiritual aid. The only person happy with the mambo's absence was Prosper Cambray, who gave no sign of pursuing her--the farther away the better when it came to that witch able to turn a human being into a zombie. For what other purpose did she collect dust from graves, the liver of puffer fish, toads, and poisonous plants, if not for those devious purposes? That was why the overseer never took off his boots. The slaves scattered broken glass on the ground, the poison entered through cuts on the soles of the feet, and the night after the funeral they dug up the cadaver, now a zombie, and revived him with a monumental beating. "Surely you don't believe in those tales!" Valmorain said, laughing, once when they were talking on that subject. "I believe nothing, monsieur, but there are zombies, there are," the overseer had replied.

At Saint-Lazare, as on the rest of the island, life was being lived at a rhythm of waiting. Tete heard repeated rumors through her master or from the slaves, but without Tante Rose she no longer knew how to interpret them. The plantation had closed in on itself, like a fist. The days grew long and the nights eternal. Even the madwoman was missed. Eugenia's death had left a void; there were hours and space to spare, the house seemed enormous, and not even the children, with all their racket, could fill it. In the fragility of that time rules were relaxed and distances shortened. Valmorain grew accustomed to Rosette's presence, and ended by tolerating familiarity with her. She did not call him
maitre
, but
monsieur
, pronouncing it like the mewing of a cat. "When I grow up, I am going to marry Rosette," Maurice would say. There would be time in the future to set things straight, his father thought. Tete tried to instill in the children the basic difference between them: Maurice had privileges forbidden Rosette, like going into a room without asking permission or sitting on the master's knees without being called. The little boy was at an age to demand explanations, and Tete always answered his questions with absolute truth. "Because you are the master's legitimate son; you are a male child, white, free, and rich, but Rosette isn't." Far from being accepted, that answer provoked attacks of weeping in Maurice. "Why, why?" he would repeat between sobs. "Because that is how twisted and unfair life is, my child," Tete would answer. "Come here and let me wipe your nose." Valmorain thought that his son was more than old enough to sleep by himself, but every time they tried to make him do that Maurice would throw a tantrum and get a fever. He could keep sleeping with Tete and Rosette until the situation became normal, his father told him. However, the tension on the island was far from approaching normality.

One evening several militiamen came to the plantation; they were moving through the north in an attempt to control the anarchy, and among them was Parmentier. The doctor seldom traveled outside Le Cap because of the dangers on the road and his duties with the French soldiers dying in his hospital. There was an outbreak of yellow fever in one of the barracks that he had controlled before it became an epidemic, but malaria, cholera, and dengue fever caused considerable havoc. Parmentier joined the militiamen's party, the one way to travel with some security, not so much to visit Valmorain, whom he saw from time to time in Le Cap, as to consult Tante Rose. He was disappointed when he learned of his teacher's disappearance. Valmorain offered hospitality to his friend and to the militiamen, who were covered with dust, thirsty, and exhausted. For a couple of days the big house was filled with activity, with male voices, and even with music, because several of the men played string instruments. Finally they could use the ones Violette Boisier had bought when she decorated the house thirteen years before; they were out of tune but playable. Valmorain sent for several slaves who had special talent on the drums, and a fiesta was organized. Tante Mathilde emptied the larder of the best it contained and prepared fruit tarts and complicated greasy and spicy creole stews she hadn't made for a long time. Prosper Cambray took charge of roasting a lamb, one of the few remaining, for they mysteriously disappeared. The hogs also vanished, and as it was impossible for the Maroons to steal those heavy animals without the complicity of the slaves on the plantation, when one went missing Cambray chose ten blacks at random and had them lashed; someone had to pay for the loss. In those months the overseer, enjoying more power than ever, was behaving as if he were the true owner of Saint-Lazare, and his insolence with Tete, more and more brazen, was his way of defying his employer, who had drawn into himself since the rebellion broke out. The unexpected visit of the militiamen, all mulattoes like him, fed his arrogance: he distributed Valmorain's liquor without consulting him, gave peremptory orders to the domestic slaves in his presence, and made jokes at his expense. Dr. Parmentier noticed all these things, just as he noticed that Tete and the children trembled when the overseer was around, and he was at the point of commenting on this to his host, but experience made him hold his tongue. Every plantation was a world apart, with its own system of relationships, its secrets and vices. For example, Rosette, the little girl with skin so light she could only be Valmorain's daughter. And what had become of Tete's other child? He would have liked to know, but he never dared asked Valmorain; the relationships of the whites with their female slaves was a forbidden subject in good society.

"I suppose that you have seen the damage caused by the rebellion, Doctor," Valmorain commented. "These bands have devastated the region."

"That is so. As we were coming here, we saw smoke from a fire at the Lacroix plantation," Parmentier told him. "When we got closer, we could see that the cane fields were still burning. There wasn't a soul around. The silence was terrifying."

"I know, Doctor, because I was among the first to reach the Habitation Lacroix after the assault," Valmorain explained. "The entire Lacroix family and their overseers and domestics were massacred; the rest of the slaves disappeared. We dug a grave and buried the bodies temporarily, until the authorities could investigate what had happened. We could not leave them strewn around like carrion. The blacks treated themselves to an orgy of blood."

"Aren't you afraid something like that will happen here?' Parmentier asked.

"We are armed and on guard, and I trust Cambray's ability," Valmorain replied. "But I confess that I am very worried. The blacks vented their rage on Lacroix and his family."

"Your friend Lacroix had a reputation for being cruel," the physician interrupted. "That inflamed the attackers even more, but in this war no one has any consideration for anyone,
mon ami
. You must be prepared for the worst."

"Did you know that for a banner the rebels carry a white infant impaled on a lance, Doctor?"

"Everyone knows it. In France there is a reaction of horror to these events. The slaves can no longer count on any sympathizer in the Assemblee--even the Societe des Amis des Noirs is quiet--but these atrocities are the logical response to what we have done to them."