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.
He continued to study the ships. They sat low in the water – too low. Sluggish water, made lazy by the hot sun, tapped against their hulls. A single figure bustled on one of the forecastles.
Birds banked and dived in the blue sky above.
Toussaint put his nose close to the ground and breathed in. He smelled mud; he smelled the richness of fertile vegetation. He smelled the spirit of Haiti. He smelled opportunity.
— How many are on the ships? he said. I mean, how many have you seen?
— Not many, just a few who mill around on the decks. Sometimes the envoy, in his silly hat.
Toussaint frowned. Not many. Yet the ships were large. He might have thought them laden with cargo – millions of francs’ worth of sugar cane, indigo, potatoes, and the like – except that cargo left Haiti; it never arrived. The only things that had ever arrived on ships like that were slaves. Slaves such as Toussaint’s father, who even on his deathbed had spoken of the endless days of sickness, of bodies being thrown overboard, of weeping in the darkness, of manacled legs and hands, of flesh rotting from contact with the human effluvium that was omnipresent belowdecks.
Why are they sitting so low in the water? he wondered. What’s on those ships?
He clapped Jean-Christophe on the back.
— I want to see what’s on those ships, he said.
— But they’re out in the bay – the commissioners still won’t let them into port.
— I know, said Toussaint. I hope you can swim.
Toussaint stood on the beach, looking out at the gray water. A path of moonlight on the sea led out to the horizon. He had the sense that if he followed it he would end up with the dead in their resting place, and for a moment he was tempted not to swim to the ship, but to just swim, until he ran out of strength, until the sea took him, until he could see Boukman again, and his father, until he could clasp their hands and say:
— It has been too long.
Gazing at the moonlight, he remembered something Boukman had told him: that the sea and the moon were linked, the moon guiding in some mysterious way the motions of the tide. Toussaint felt that the sea was indeed more of the moon than of the earth. It seemed an alien place, full of strange creatures, whispering to him, but cold. He took a deep breath, ignored the impulse, and concentrated on feeling the wind on his bare skin.
Jean-Christophe stood beside him, shivering. Toussaint stepped forward so that his feet were in the water, and suddenly he was afraid to go on. He perceived the surface of the sea not as a simple plane, but as a membrane, a horizontal border into somewhere foreign and not of this world. He took a step back.
Jean-Christophe touched his shoulder.
— Look, he said.
He pointed to a shape in the gloom beside them, half-buried in the sand. Toussaint peered down and saw the face and bust of a beautiful woman, her eyes of peeling paint, her form of wood. He identified it as the figurehead from the prow of a ship, a mascot and no doubt source of comfort to the men who had sailed with her. Presumably that ship had long since foundered, but the sight of her carved hair and heaved bosom gave a strange access of courage to Toussaint. He stooped to touch her, noting how closely she resembled icons he had seen of la Sirene, the lwa of the sea and of the dead.
The wood was warm to the touch, and he smiled. He had seen the ocean before, with his father, and seen the things that swept up on the beach: pieces of polished wood, glass, sometimes even human bones, or barrels of still unperished food and drink. The sea, he realized, was not foreign at all; it behaved like humans. It took things – the driftwood, the drowned – and loved them, but always, like a person who dies and leaves behind their possessions, it ultimately abandoned them, casting them up onto shore, and moving on. Nothing belonged to the sea forever; it would always end up on some beach somewhere, forgotten.
The sea expels these things, he thought, these mementos of the lost. It does not want to remember.
He understood that. He did not want to remember, either, did not want to think about his ancestors who had come, suffering, to this land over this shining sea. But what he wanted and what he did were two different countries at war with each other. He wanted to be with Isaac, yet here he was. He wanted to ignore the past, yet he fed on it for his anger, for his impetus in his fight against the slavers.
He touched the warm face of the wooden lady once more, then walked out into the ocean and let it embrace him. Behind him, he heard Jean-Christophe gasp as he entered it.
The water was slippery, almost greasy, against Toussaint’s skin. He swam breaststroke, his hands meeting before him like prayers.
He thought of the fish swimming beneath him, their silvery grace drinking in the light from the moon above, reflecting it with their flashing scales. The taste of salt was in his mouth. He was not a particularly strong swimmer – having only swum in river pools before – but he was stronger than Jean-Christophe. He could hear the younger man struggling behind him, his breathing heavy and labored.
Ahead, he could see the glow of the ship’s lights on the water. From the hill he had observed a ladder with his spyglass, and he made toward it. He knew himself to be invisible – he was black, and so was the water. Cape Town had a port patrol, but it was over to the east, close to the shore. They were guarding the quays against the men in the ships – it had not occurred to them that someone might go from shore to the ships.
There was the rope ladder hanging from the side of the first ship. For a moment he simply hung from the bottom of the ladder to catch his breath. The black water tapped against the hull with a soft, rhythmic clapotis. He glanced back, saw Jean-Christophe nearing the ship, and gestured to him to follow. Then he began to climb and soon reached the height of the portholes. Swinging himself from side to side, he gathered some momentum. This was the dangerous part. He caught hold of a round opening and hauled himself up, until he was looking inside the ship.
His eyes widened.
In the hold, men sat in row upon row, or slept in hammocks and on the small spaces of planking afforded them by gaps between barrels of powder. All wore some semblance of uniform, although many had taken off their heavy surcoats and draped them over spars and beams. Weapons were arranged in metal pyramids on the floor.
Soldiers.
One of the men who was opposite Toussaint, facing toward the porthole he was looking through, paused and frowned. He cocked his head to peer at the space where Toussaint was. Toussaint held his breath. He closed his eyes, hiding their whiteness in the darkness.
He counted to twenty.
Opening his eyes a crack, he saw that the soldier had turned his attention to one of his neighbors, and was sharing some tobacco with him. Toussaint breathed out very slowly. Then he quietly rejoined the ladder and climbed down. The sea when he reached it was shocking cold and as bracing as a baptism.
He swam to the next ship and climbed its barnacled hull. Inside, arrayed in rows or lying in sleep like discarded toys, not in use at present, were hundreds upon hundreds of soldiers.
The third ship was the same.
It was what he had expected, but it was still terrible to see. The number of them! A host such as Haiti had never seen, the country having relied upon fear and intimidation more than military force to subdue its black population. He and the other generals had overcome the commissioners, but how could they hope to overcome such as these?
By pure chance, he was clinging to the side of that third ship when an officer entered the hold where the soldiers were sleeping, or playing cards, or drinking from small bottles of rum concealed about their persons. He rapped his sword against a beam, and the soldiers scrambled to attention.
— The commissioners defy us, he said. Therefore, tomorrow, before dawn, we invade by force.
— Vive la – began one of the soldiers, amidst the hubbub of voices.
— Hush, said the officer. Do you wish them to hear us?
Yes, thought Toussaint. Yes, I do.
Galvanized, he entered the water once again and struck out for shore. He swam with a sure, swift stroke. The moonlight still made a path on the water that looked as if it must lead somewhere for anyone brave enough to follow it. Toussaint had been to enough vodou funerals to know that the adherents of that hybrid faith often floated their dead down that road to sink them into the ocean.
For a moment he considered that luminous road, but then he thought of something. Even with the help of the commissioners, he wondered how they could vanquish the army that France had sent. But not all of my men are free yet.
— Are you well? asked Jean-Christophe, drawing level with him.
He smiled.
— Very well, thank you, he said.
He swam back to the land, the scented and beautiful land, nourished with the blood of his people, rising like the curves of a woman above the night-black water.