All Souls' Rising (14 page)

For just an instant, the barest glimpse, she looked as if she’d been stabbed with ice. Then she was laughing merrily as ever. “Oh, you are jealous,” she said. “
Bon ça
.” She rose and came around the table toward him. “I think you must have eaten and rested enough, then,” she said. “Let’s see how well you are restored.”

Chapter Eight

A
LL THE WAY DOWN INTO
B
OIS
C
AYMAN
, I was thinking of Macandal. We were going there, to LeNormand plantation, where he once lived, or where his death began. The whitemen might say he died for love—whitemen believe that things happen for reasons, or if they don’t believe it always, they always wish that it were so. All that happened before I was born, when my
gros-bon-ange
was still with
les Mystères
, and my
ti-bon-ange
, eh, where was that? But I knew about it, everyone knew, and as we were coming down from the mountain I knew the others would be thinking of it too.

In Guinée, Macandal was a Mandingue but at Habitation LeNormand he was a slave who fed the sugar mill. He stood at the end of the line and pushed the trimmed cane through the place where the raised edges of the grinding wheels meshed together like teeth in a mouth as they pulled inward. The mules that powered the mill walked around and around at the ends of their long poles, led by yawning children, half asleep, because at LeNormand they ran the mill at night. It’s not such hard work feeding cane into the mill, not dangerous, so long as you stay awake, but a slave who has been in the fields all day and then goes to the mill at night may grow tired and drowse and give the mill a finger or a hand. That’s why they always sing in the mills at night, to keep themselves awake, and I wonder what they were singing then, before Macandal’s scream cut through the song and someone stopped the mules, too late, when the mill had already taken his arm to the shoulder.

Or maybe there was no scream, maybe he never cried out at all, even when the mill ground to a stop and someone took a cane knife and cut his arm off at the shoulder to get him loose from it. And they were singing to him all the time, whatever song it was, they never stopped, and he was singing too, and kept on singing when they cut him away and his arm came out the other end of the mill with the flesh in ribbons and the bone crushed into the frayed and flattened
bagasse
. His blood ran down into the syrup, and somewhere in France a whiteman stirred it into his coffee, Macandal’s blood poisoned him, and he died. Yes, it must have been like that. When we were coming down the mountain into Bois Cayman, I saw how he would have taken the knife himself and cut through his own arm, or gnawed it through with his Mandingue teeth like an animal will do with a leg in a trap, because once the arm was severed, he was cut through. No one sends a one-armed slave into the mill or the fields again.

Another man would have died from the wound, and seen his
corps-cadavre
put into the ground, but if Macandal died he was born again. They made him a herdsman. I know how it was for him, that part of it, because Toussaint once let me go myself, to watch the cattle. So he was alone, out there for weeks at a time, running out of food most likely, having little water, but able to think and learn, how to live from the land, what vines to cut for water. To protect himself from the wild dogs and protect the cows, and from the maroons too. There were always maroon bands passing through the foothills, here in Bois Cayman where stray cattle might wander. It might not be the first time, not the second, but one time he would follow them. But he was Macandal, he would not follow, he would lead.

Bois Cayman is an old forest and we were in it a long time. It was a living place and we cut nothing to get through it. The paths were few and they went nowhere or just ended. Sometimes we could hear other bands moving in the jungle near us, large or small. Some seemed to know their way and passed us quickly, and there were others that we passed ourselves. Macandal would have known them all, he went from one band to another. He was everywhere on this side of the mountains, and many places on the other. He learned all that was in the forest, and learned the secrets of Guinée that the old maroons had saved for him, and he learned secrets which the
caciques
knew before the whitemen killed them all.

He learned herbs, and medicines, and poisons, especially those. He gave poison to the maroons and gave it to herdsmen too, and field slaves, and house slaves finally, best of all. They killed animals in the fields with it, and of course they killed each other, and themselves sometimes. Macandal knew what we all do. Any death can hurt a whiteman somewhere. If it is only a slave or a cow, he is less rich. You make a man like Arnaud grow a little smaller if you kill only his dog. But soon the whitemen began to die in their own houses too. The slaves learned to find new poisons in the house, arsenic and lead. Then there were trials and torture and burnings but the poisoning did not stop. Macandal filled the city of Le Cap with it. Thousands of slaves were saving poison, waiting for that single day when they planned to use it once to destroy all the whitemen. Then the whitemen would be finished in this country and the city would belong to the maroons.

But there was love, if it was that. Macandal went to a
calenda
and they say he went to see a woman, that he would not have gone only to dance. Some say he had taken the woman off into the forest before and that it was a lover of hers, still on Dufresne plantation where the
calenda
was held, who saw him and told the
gérant
that he was there. They all say he was betrayed. The whitemen couldn’t catch Macandal by themselves. But the
gérant
did come to know of it, somehow, and because no one had ever taken Macandal by force he used cunning. He had barrels of rum sent to the
calenda
, and then, when the dancers were all drunk and asleep, he tied up Macandal and took him that way.

So then he died again. Not easily or all at once. He broke the ropes and got away before they left Dufresne, but dogs ran him down before he could go far. They took him to a prison at Le Cap and that is where they burned him. Inside the fire he broke the chains that held him to the stake, but he did not walk out of the fire still in his body. The fire took his
corps-cadavre
, but he turned his
ti-bon-ange
into a mosquito and it flew away. The mosquito is still here somewhere. Many saw it. Achille says that he was there and saw it all, though he may be lying. But he says that he saw everything and that he shouted out when the others did,
Macandal is free
.

That must have been a fine
calenda
there at Dufresne, where Macandal was taken, or he would not have come, but I don’t think even it could have been so big as the one we danced at Bois Cayman. At once I could see that the people must have come from plantations all over the northern plain and there were as many as at the market in Le Cap. Thousands—and that is only the number of the living.

A long way off still, we could hear the drumming. It was
rada
drumming we heard first, though both
rada
and
petro
drums were there. It was thick dark by the time we came near but we could feel more and more people moving around us in the jungle, and when we began to come into the clearing it seemed that there were even more people than trees. There were more and more people coming out of the jungle all the time so it looked like the trees were giving birth to men.

Boukman and his people had made a big
hûnfor
in the clearing. No altar sheds, but at the center of the peristyle they had topped a straight tree and left the peeled trunk standing for a
poteau mitan
. Damballah and Aida Wedo were wrapped in a painted spiral around it to the ground. There were forty young
hounsis
all dressed in white, and a
mambo
whose name I never learned, though she was as big as two houses. I looked around and saw at the edge of the clearing the mapou tree which was Damballah’s house. I knew Damballah must live there because a bowl of milk and egg had been put there for him to eat, nailed up in a crate so no one but Damballah could slither between the slats to eat his food.

Damballah had not raised his head or come out of where he lived in the tree, but in the peristyle the
hounsis
sang a song for him while they clapped their hands and rolled their hips with the drumming.

We come from Guinée

We have no father

We have no mother

Marassa Eyo!

Papa Damballah, show us

Show us Dahomey again
…

I listened to the song of Damballah, standing there beside Jean-Pic and also with the new man, who had run away from Arnaud’s plantation. Aiguy, we called him. It was what he called himself, though we didn’t know if this had been his name when he was a slave in Arnaud’s cane field. Some men who we knew from the town of Le Cap came to us then, and I told them the name of Aiguy.

When I looked at Aiguy then I still saw him as he had looked before, wearing the headstall and thrashing his head around like a wild cow crazed for water. The stall was gone now, and the only sign of it was a thick weal healing pink across the back of his neck, and some other hook-shaped slashes where the tin collar had cut him each time he hung the prongs up, running through the jungle. Aiguy began telling the men from Le Cap what had happened and what Riau had done. How he had lain with the headstall caught in lianas, waiting for the dogs, and how he heard us coming, Riau and Jean-Pic, and heard Jean-Pic tell Riau that he should kill him.

Aiguy believed that Riau would do what Jean-Pic had said, or else he would be left there for the dogs. He knew that there was no love between maroons and slaves, and that the maroons did not trust the slaves who ran away to them, thinking that they might be spies who would deliver them all to the whitemen again. But still, the maroons must have been slaves themselves sometime, except the ones who were born in the mountains. Anyway there was nowhere else for Aiguy to run, and he had seen that if he stayed on Arnaud’s plantation he would surely die. Then he would rather die in the jungle, and he thought that he would rather be killed by Riau’s cane knife than wait for the dogs to find him there. So when he heard the knife blade go humming up and then start whistling a little as it dropped he expected to return his
gros-bon-ange
to
les Mystères
…

When this story was done I asked of the men of Le Cap how many had come here to Bois Cayman from that place, and he told me there were very many. In the city too the word had passed from
hûngan
to
hûngan, hûnfor
to
hûnfor
, the same as in the mountains and all over the plain. There were maroon bands from everywhere in the island too, even a band from Bahoruco, over beyond the torches on the far side of the peristyle.

I stood on my toes and craned my neck to look for the Bahoruco maroons, who I had heard much about but never seen. People said that they had a big fortress in ancient caves the
caciques
had used, and where the gods of the
caciques
still lived. Somewhere they must have found a great power, the people said, because they had fought a war with the whitemen and won it, and made the whitemen give them their own country and write a paper that said that it was theirs. So I was looking hard to see these strong maroons, but before I could see them there was a stir in the crowd and someone came through handing out papers.

No one could read but still everyone was reaching for the papers and some were fighting over them. Except Riau, I, Riau didn’t want a paper, not this night. But Aiguy got one and clutched it in his hand. It was a single sheet, but made to look like a page of a
journal
. No one knew till a long time later that these papers were false and that Toussaint had got them to be printed. Aiguy ran his eyes up and down it, sticking his lips out like a kiss. He was holding it sideways so the words dropped down in columns instead of running in rows like they should. He gave the paper to Riau then and all by itself my hand turned it right way up. The letters were rattling like chains linked together on the paper. They wanted to start speaking to Riau, but I threw the paper down. Jean-Pic picked it up and glared at me, because he knew.

Just the same the words began to talk. On the edge of the peristyle, a big Ibo field hand lifted a smaller mulatto onto his shoulders. The mulatto wore rich man’s clothes and had a funny freckled face. Jean-Pic shifted beside me.

“I don’t like to see him here,” he said. “He has a white father.”

Of course it was plain that he had a white father, like any
homme de couleur
, but what Jean-Pic meant was that he had a father who protected him and gave him property, and that probably he owned slaves. I was near enough to see his face well. Except for his pale skin and his funny spots he had the face of a man of Guinée, but the expression of a whiteman—cruelty, and the habit of power his whole life. But he opened his mouth and the paper spoke through him.

The paper said that the King In France had made a new law for the slaves here, we. The new law was that there would be no more whippings now.
Abolition du fouet
—there was shouting when the paper put these words in that mulatto’s mouth. And the law said that the
colons
must give us three days free each week, Sunday and two others these three days
congé
, to rest or work for ourselves in our provision grounds. And for this the shouting was even louder than for what the paper had to say about the whip.

The whitemen would say that we were foolish to believe these things the paper said. Sometimes it happens to one of us too, the good blood of Guinée drains out, a man becomes old and pale to transparency and he can’t know what to believe anymore at all. But it was easy to believe what the paper said then. The King In France had made laws for us before this time. There was the Code Noir, which said that our masters must feed us, and limited our work, and outlawed the worst punishments, but many of the
colons
did not obey this law. Lately there were new laws about the colored people, but the
colons
would not obey these either.