Read Online Master of the Crossroads by Madison Smartt Bell - Free Book Online
Authors: Madison Smartt Bell
Tags: Biographical, Biographical fiction, Fiction, Literary, Historical fiction, General, Historical, Haiti, Haiti - History - Revolution, Toussaint Louverture, Slave insurrections, 1791-1804
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turned his horse into the forest, onto a still steeper slope. Moustique followed, urging the donkey with a squeeze around his legs, which scissored around the animal’s belly so far that his feet could almost touch. Under the trees, a damp, green cool was lingering, welcome now at the day’s fullest heat.
Underfoot it was also damp, the earth tearing under the animals’ hooves. Moustique watched the white charger, Bel Argent, sleek packets of muscle moving in his hindquarters. Toussaint, with a light pressure of his heels on the horse’s flanks and a few clucks of his tongue, negotiated his way around a shelf of raw rock overhung with vines. When he had reached the height of this himself, Moustique looked back once, but there was nothing to see but jungle; Habitation Thibodet had disappeared.
He had never been so high, on this particular mountain. The slope grew still more arduous, so that Moustique believed that Toussaint must surely dismount, but he seemed knitted to the saddle. Bel Argent yawed sideways, scattered wet dirt with his hooves, and finally seemed to scramble up onto some sort of level ground. In a moment Moustique had maneuvered his burro over the same lip; he found that they were standing on a narrow stone road, just wide enough for one mounted man to pass, or possibly two men walking abreast. Toussaint glanced at him dispassionately, wheeled his horse and started westward at a trot. Moustique followed. There was a hoof clack from Toussaint’s mount as they went on, as if they were crossing a cobblestone street. Moustique looked down and studied the road’s surface; thousands of smallish flints set close against each other and mortared in place by mud. He wondered who possibly could have made it.
“Les caciques,” Toussaint said, with a half-turn of his head, as if Moustique had asked the question aloud. The Indians. They were dead now, all of them, their line extinguished. Nearly so. Once, before the insurrection, a band of maroon blacks had passed the little church on the Massacre River, and Moustique’s father had pointed out among them a mestizo: the glossy black hair completely straight, the flat, coppery patina of his face. His father had kept a box of small stone objects made by those extinguished Indians, ax heads, laughing and groaning faces, phalluses and animal figures all in a jumble. He was dead now too, Moustique’s father.
To the north side of the road, the jungle opened into a sudden, long declivity, which gave view to a fertile valley far below. Beyond were more mountains, chains of them receding from green to distant blue, to the warped misty line of the horizon. Moustique imagined he could see the ocean, or smoke rising faintly over Cap Français, where his father had been executed on the public square, bound and broken on a wheel. The jungle closed over the road again, shut off the view, but Moustique saw in his mind’s mirror the executioner’s hammer falling to break a shin or elbow, and his father’s voice shouting in reply: Domine, non sum dignus! He would not weep, and his mother was equally iron-faced, standing beside him in the crowd, only she had bitten through her lips until the blood ran out the corners of her mouth, as if she’d just been killing something with her teeth. Both before and afterward Moustique had been stoned by other boys of his own age and often of his color too; they mocked him for being the son of a priest. That day he felt nothing from the stoning, though afterward he wondered at the wild rainbows of color the bruises raised on his gold skin.
He stopped thinking, let the memory drop. He had learned this, since those terrible days in Le Cap, this emptying, like the passage from dream to sleep, though his eyes were open, all his senses present; he could remark land crabs clinging to the narrow boles of trees, a green parrot gliding silently across the roadcut up ahead, was half aware of the mutual sweat that glued his knees to the donkey’s
Underfoot it was also damp, the earth tearing under the animals’ hooves. Moustique watched the white charger, Bel Argent, sleek packets of muscle moving in his hindquarters. Toussaint, with a light pressure of his heels on the horse’s flanks and a few clucks of his tongue, negotiated his way around a shelf of raw rock overhung with vines. When he had reached the height of this himself, Moustique looked back once, but there was nothing to see but jungle; Habitation Thibodet had disappeared.
He had never been so high, on this particular mountain. The slope grew still more arduous, so that Moustique believed that Toussaint must surely dismount, but he seemed knitted to the saddle. Bel Argent yawed sideways, scattered wet dirt with his hooves, and finally seemed to scramble up onto some sort of level ground. In a moment Moustique had maneuvered his burro over the same lip; he found that they were standing on a narrow stone road, just wide enough for one mounted man to pass, or possibly two men walking abreast. Toussaint glanced at him dispassionately, wheeled his horse and started westward at a trot. Moustique followed. There was a hoof clack from Toussaint’s mount as they went on, as if they were crossing a cobblestone street. Moustique looked down and studied the road’s surface; thousands of smallish flints set close against each other and mortared in place by mud. He wondered who possibly could have made it.
“Les caciques,” Toussaint said, with a half-turn of his head, as if Moustique had asked the question aloud. The Indians. They were dead now, all of them, their line extinguished. Nearly so. Once, before the insurrection, a band of maroon blacks had passed the little church on the Massacre River, and Moustique’s father had pointed out among them a mestizo: the glossy black hair completely straight, the flat, coppery patina of his face. His father had kept a box of small stone objects made by those extinguished Indians, ax heads, laughing and groaning faces, phalluses and animal figures all in a jumble. He was dead now too, Moustique’s father.
To the north side of the road, the jungle opened into a sudden, long declivity, which gave view to a fertile valley far below. Beyond were more mountains, chains of them receding from green to distant blue, to the warped misty line of the horizon. Moustique imagined he could see the ocean, or smoke rising faintly over Cap Français, where his father had been executed on the public square, bound and broken on a wheel. The jungle closed over the road again, shut off the view, but Moustique saw in his mind’s mirror the executioner’s hammer falling to break a shin or elbow, and his father’s voice shouting in reply: Domine, non sum dignus! He would not weep, and his mother was equally iron-faced, standing beside him in the crowd, only she had bitten through her lips until the blood ran out the corners of her mouth, as if she’d just been killing something with her teeth. Both before and afterward Moustique had been stoned by other boys of his own age and often of his color too; they mocked him for being the son of a priest. That day he felt nothing from the stoning, though afterward he wondered at the wild rainbows of color the bruises raised on his gold skin.
He stopped thinking, let the memory drop. He had learned this, since those terrible days in Le Cap, this emptying, like the passage from dream to sleep, though his eyes were open, all his senses present; he could remark land crabs clinging to the narrow boles of trees, a green parrot gliding silently across the roadcut up ahead, was half aware of the mutual sweat that glued his knees to the donkey’s
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