The Salt Roads Read online

  “Sorry . . . !”

  Patrice tried to catch the person as she fell. His hands touched a breast, a shoulder. That whipping scar was familiar; the one shaped like a leaf of cane. He was the one who’d rubbed Mer’s healing aloe on it when it was new. “Tipingee?”

  “Who . . . ? Patrice?”

  It was her. She touched his face, sat down beside him. She was laughing a little. He’d forgotten that about Tipingee, how she could remember to laugh, even in this place. “So it’s here you were coming to,” she whispered. Her voice was teasing, but a little doubtful. “Thought maybe you were going to spend the night in someone else’s cabin.”

  She could warm him simply by speaking, this woman. “No, Makandal told me today about the meeting.”

  “Makandal? Didn’t you and he fall out?”

  “No . . .” The words came out before he could think that they might be rash: “Just pretending so. That way the backra don’t get suspicious. It’s Makandal . . .” No, better not tell her that it was Makandal who had persuaded him to return. Let her continue to think he had missed her. And in truth he had, terribly. Just that more even than the sweetness of her he had longed to live his days and nights without fear, without pain, without the crushing sadness that was sometimes so great that the weight of it bore some of the Ginen to their deaths.

  Someone came in bearing a lit lamp, the flickering shadows it cast dragging their features into a mask of horror. Everyone hissed at him to put it out.

  “Stupid man,” Tipingee whispered to Patrice. She snuck her warm, callused hand into his. “Suppose the book-keeper followed him here by that light? Or old Cuba? That woman never sleeps. Hector!” Tipingee hissed into the cabin.

  “Yes?”

  “Congo John there with you?”

  “Here,” rumbled Congo John.

  “The two of you go and see if anybody followed that lamplight to us.”

  The sound of bare feet hitting rotting floorboards and the noise of people shuffling aside to let the two men pass told them that Hector and Congo John had gone on their errand.

  “What are they going to do if they find anybody?” Patrice asked Tipingee.

  “I don’t know,” she told him. “Serious business this.”

  “They have their machètes,” someone said. It was the deep-voiced woman, Fleur.

  Machètes? But if anyone was found murdered, it would be hell to pay for the rest of them. “Where is Makandal, eh?” Patrice asked Fleur and Tipingee. He could feel perspiration trickling down his cheek. He squeezed Tipingee’s hand and felt her squeeze back.

  “My friends,” boomed Makandal in the blackness of the cabin. Patrice jumped at the sudden loud sound. His whole body flushed cold with fright.

  “Makandal?” someone asked.

  The voice rumbled a deep, reassuring laugh. It’s so a father might chuckle when his child did something amusing. “Yes, my friends; it’s me.”

  “Show us, then.”

  “You doubt me?”

  “No, sah, we don’t doubt you,” hissed one voice.

  But another said, “We have to be sure. Could be a trick.”

  “True thing that,” responded Makandal. “Who here has a lamp? Light it for me, please, brother. Let me show you my face one little moment.” Makandal’s voice still sounded amused. “Then you will have to out the light again. Can’t make your master know we’re here.”

  “Your” master, he said. As though he didn’t have his master too. Patrice knew well the fatherlike tone Makandal was using now. All fine and good if you and he were agreeing, but just argue with him once, and that voice could suddenly go sharp and biting on you.

  The door opened. Patrice shivered in the draft from it. Two people came in, were challenged by others. It was Hector and Congo John, come back. No one had raised the alarm, they said.

  Patrice could hear someone striking in a tinder box. Must have taken it from Simenon’s kitchen; none of the Ginen were given anything so useful. Finally the spunk lit and was transferred to a lamp, which was passed hand to hand through the crowd until Makandal could take it in his whole left hand. He held it up beside his face; circled it down below his chin then up around to the other side of his face, like the sun circling the earth. Shadows jittered on his features, making them change; angelic one minute, the very Christian devil the next. Patrice shuddered. Sometimes his friend disturbed him.

  Makandal smiled. “Everybody see me good now?”

  “Yes, Makandal.”

  He blew the lamp out, hid the shining earth of his gaze again. Patrice took a big sigh of relief. The light had made him nervous. He whispered to Tipingee, “He loves to have eyes on him, eh?”

  “He is a leader,” she answered. “He must act like one.”

  “Is that the voice of Patrice I hear, talking over me when I’m trying to speak?” asked Makandal.

  “Yes, Patrice,” Fleur scolded, “hush up your noise. The man wants to talk.”

  Patrice, quivering at how unfair the accusation was, said nothing, just remained quiet. They must keep up their pretense, he and his friend Makandal.

  Makandal continued, “My brothers, my sisters, you honour me. Tonight you have sneaked out from your huts, your cabins. You sneaked out from those cages the backra built for we Ginen, just to come and hear my thoughts. So brave a thing you did.

  “But it’s so my Ginen people are. Brave, we Mandingue, we Ashanti, we Congo, we Ibo, we Allada people. You know those words, my friends?”

  “Yes!” someone cried out. The others hissed at her to be quiet.

  Makandal laughed. “Yes, I see that some of you remember. Remember what we are, remember our names. We Mandingue, we Ashanti, we Congo, we Ibo, we Allada people. We Mandingue, we Ashanti, we Congo, we Ibo, we Allada people. Say it with me, my brothers and sisters.”

  And the crowd echoed, quietly, “We Mandingue, we Ashanti, we Congo, we Ibo, we Allada people.”

  “Again.” They said it again.

  Patrice whispered the words, thought of his mother saying, “You are Ibo. Never forget.” He’d never really known what the word meant. He’d been born in Saint Domingue.

  But now he felt it, felt something making the word “Ibo” sing through him. “Ibo people,” he muttered. “Ibo.”

  “Again,” said Makandal. Patrice chanted again with the rest of the Ginen. He could feel his eyes getting wet. Beside him, Tipingee was rocking as she said the words.

  “Again.”

  The hoarse whispers of the crowd grew intense. The words flew like darts through the air. Mandingue. Ashanti. Congo. Ibo. Allada. Mandingue. Ashanti. Congo. Ibo. Allada.

  Again and again and again Makandal made them say it until it felt as though the whole hut was rocking with the words, would shake itself loose and fling itself into the air on the power of words.

  Mandingue. Ashanti. Congo. Ibo. Allada. Mandingue. Ashanti. Congo. Ibo. Allada.

  “Stop!” Makandal commanded. The crowd fell silent. Patrice gasped. He was back in himself again, his head buzzing with the names the Ginen were no longer calling. The names that would stay in his head now, always being murmured in his head. The words that would bubble their strength in his veins. Ibo, he was Ibo. And a man of the Ginen. An African.

  “Yes,” Makandal mused, so quiet that Patrice had to hold his breath to hear, “brave people, my Ginen people. So tell me then, brothers and sisters,” he continued, a little bit louder, “why are we here? Eh?”

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Makandal said, “Anybody can tell me why we’re here, slaving till our deaths in this white devils’ land?”

  Someone mumbled in a puzzled voice, “But it’s the backra, Makandal. It’s they who captured us, brought us here.”

  “True thing that,” Makandal’s voice boomed out of darkness. “Bought us like goats. And here we find ourselves, breaking back every day. But why? Anybody tell me why we put up with it?”

  Patrice couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “But what you want us to do, m
an? Eh? Tipingee told me what Simenon did to Milo, how he blanched Milo dead, just for talking his mind. Just for talking, Makandal. And they have guns.”

  “Poison works,” cackled Fleur.

  “Poison.” So many times Patrice had had this argument, he was fed up of it. “You give one backra belly running, they’ll hang ten of us and import twenty more to replace the dead ones. So what good is all your poisoning doing, except making the backra more likely to take out their fear on us?”

  Makandal cut through Patrice’s speech. “Poison weakens. Poison brings fear. Poison can kill.”

  “We can’t kill them all before they kill us, Makandal!”

  Makandal laughed, a low, scorpion-like hissing in the blind dark of the hut. “It’s there you’re wrong, Patrice.” He raised his voice a little. “If everybody follows what I say, we could get them all one time, and have Saint Domingue for us; for the Ginen!”

  “What?” Patrice had heard Makandal’s fantasies before, but this was madness.

  “Yes, Makandal; tell us your plan!” said someone else. Sounded like Congo John. Many voices rumbled in agreement.

  “Friends,” Makandal said, “thank you for having faith enough to listen. Some people won’t even grant me that.”

  Tipingee leaned forward and whispered in Patrice’s ear: “You sure he’s acting? Seems like he really doesn’t like you any more.”

  Patrice felt the words stick him like a piquette flung into his heart. “Hush,” he replied. “Don’t make people hear you.”

  He disagreed with Makandal, yes; always had. But by speaking it publicly this way he was only doing what Makandal had asked. So many days he had voiced these same doubts to Makandal in the canefields and later in the bush after Patrice was gone on marronage, when Makandal would meet him by pretending to lose his master de Mézy’s goats and having to go wandering away from de Mézy’s plantation to find them. They would meet halfway in the bush, between maroon land and the backra’s. They would sit with the goats prancing around them, and they would argue and argue about the best way to get freedom in this wicked new world. And though he knew that Makandal was only acting his part now, pretending not to get along with him any more so that there’d be one ally above suspicion, it still hurt Patrice to have Makandal bad-talk him so.

  Makandal had been quiet a few seconds. He said, “Plenty of you here have been helping me already, yes?”

  “Yes, Makandal.”

  “Been taking the physicks I give you and slipping them into the backra’s food, his wine, his water.”

  “Yes, Makandal. Making him sick too bad.” The person giggled. “And anybody who eats great house food.”

  “Yes. Same thing too at Belle Espoir; all through Limbé. Now I know what works best. Now I can spread my net wider to catch whitefish. My brothers and sisters, lean close; let me tell you.”

  Patrice heard everyone suck in a breath and hold it, quiet, so they could hear Makandal’s plan. He couldn’t help himself; he was doing it too.

  “A woman from Belle Espoir showed me a thing a few weeks ago; how to use a sharpened straw to inject medicine into the blood of the body for healing.”

  “Wai! What a marvel!” murmured Fleur in surprise. Patrice felt Tipingee beside him go still with attention. Her fingers loosened their grasp on his hand a little.

  “Yes, my friends,” Makandal continued. “For healing. So I think to myself, ‘If for healing, why not for harming?’”

  “But Makandal,” Tipingee called out, “you want us to walk around jooking straws into the blans? They will kill all of us dead for sure!”

  “No, my sister. Not into the backra.”

  “Where then?”

  “Into their water barrels.”

  The crowd erupted in hissing and whispering. The water barrels! Makandal wasn’t the only one who’d been trying to poison his captors. To protect themselves, the white people had taken to importing pure water in sealed casks from France. They used it for everything; to drink, to cook with. If the Ginen could poison the backra’s supply of water . . .

  Patrice couldn’t stand it any longer. He let go Tipingee’s hand and stood up. “What nonsense are you chatting, Makandal? So we kill the backra on two plantations, maybe three. Then what? After the rest of them get done with us, won’t be anybody left to carry out your big scheme.”

  The voice that came back at him in the night was oily, triumphant. Days afterwards Patrice would feel it sticking gloatingly on his skin. “My brother Patrice,” Makandal chuckled, “thank you for showing the rest of us how we limit ourselves when we think only in small ways. You’re right, you know. If we only make havoc on a few plantations, the white man will suppress us fast, and the rest of the Ginen still will be in bondage.”

  People in the crowd murmured doubtfully, agreeing. Patrice breathed hard, taking in the smells of the bodies packed around him. He felt his name must really be Chagrin. This was supposed to be only play-acting, this sparring between him and Makandal, but the jibes stung like real barbs. Tipingee put an arm around Patrice. Makandal continued, “But do my Ginen people all make their thoughts small? Eh?”

  “No, Makandal,” a woman responded in a whisper.

  “What, only one of you? Do the rest of you all have narrow little thoughts, then?”

  “No, Makandal!” More whispered voices this time.

  “Tell me again.”

  “No, Makandal!” The chorus of voices had grown.

  “Tell me like you mean it!”

  This time, the murmured “no”s had the passion of a quiet thunder of voices: “NO, MAKANDAL!”

  “Good. So. Those of you who want to be small people, tell me your names. Right now; speak up.”

  In the ringing silence Patrice could hear the frogs wooing over by the river and the chuckle of the river water. “Ah,” said Makandal. “Seems like you all want to dream big dreams with me. You all dream of owning your own land to work, of having enough food to eat, of having children to ease your old age.”

  Patrice thought of the bush he’d left, where he had those things already. He wondered if Curaçao had birthed her baby yet. If she would ever forgive him for leaving, for abandoning the dream he had with her for a bigger dream; a vision that he and all his people could walk free in this land.

  “Even Patrice must have big dreams,” Makandal gloated, “for I don’t hear him whining like the mosquito in our ears no more.”

  The crowd burst into muffled laughter. Someone slapped Patrice on the back and said, “Never mind, man. We know your heart’s good, even if your spirit is sometimes craven.”

  “This is what we’re going to do,” Makandal said. Suddenly his voice was all business. “How many of you are going travelling to other plantations on backra business soon?”

  “Me, Makandal,” said a voice. “Going to be part of a troupe raiding the maroons.”

  Patrice’s heart pattered when he heard this. How could he warn the maroons? But likely they already knew. Maroons had informants everywhere.

  “Me, Makandal,” said another. “Going to Belle Espoir to train some of the Ginen there how to mind the boilers. Their boiler man fell into a vat of hot syrup.”

  Still another voice said, “Couva is going away soon. She’s in the stocks tonight. Simenon got tired of her always running away and he sold her to someone else.”

  “See how that man makes his own enemies?” Makandal said. “I will go and talk to her tonight. I will sit by her and keep the mosquitoes off her body, and rub her back that’s aching with being bent into the stocks. And I think she’ll be happy when she’s sold away to carry some knowledge with her, of how to make the poison she’s going to put in the water casks that come to the plantation they have sold her to.”

  “And the rest of us, Makandal?” Fleur called out. “The other ones who’re going travelling?”

  “I will teach you all how to make the poison. I will teach you all how to use the straws. You will tell the Ginen on the other plantations; the ones yo
u can trust, mind. They will tell others. When we have Ginen on all the plantations prepared to blow poison into the backra’s water, we will strike.”

  “But . . .” someone said doubtfully, “that’s still not the whole country, Makandal. How will we get to all the plantations?”

  The ripple of the invisible Makandal’s laugh made the hairs rise on Patrice’s arm. “But that’s the beauty of it, my people. We can reach all the plantations, yes. Quick as flight we can do it.”

  The noises coming from the crowd sounded unsure, uncomfortable. “My Ginen doubt me?” asked Makandal.

  Silence. No one wanted to be made an example of, the way Patrice had been.

  “I see,” Makandal said, still chuckling. “My Ginen are prudent, not hasty. Good thing that. Somebody bring me back that oil lamp there.”

  A young man stepped forward with the lamp.

  “Light it for me, my brother,” said Makandal.

  The young man knelt, put the lamp down to have his hands free. A sound came of stones striking against each other, then a small flame flared in the sombre night.

  “Hold it up to me, my friend,” Makandal told him. “High, so everyone can see.”

  The young man stood up and did as Makandal asked. The lamp illuminated Makandal’s smiling face. “Mark me good, now,” he told them all. He looked around slowly, at the faces he likely couldn’t see, but knew were there.

  Then he was gone. People in the crowd cried out and gasped. It was Congo John who shouted, “Look! There so!”

  A hummingbird hovered around the lamp, dipping a little to one side; favouring its clipped wing. The young man holding the lamp just gaped.

  Patrice sighed. Makandal was going against his advice, was showing his business to everyone. The first time Makandal had showed him this ouanga, this changing into other beasts, Patrice’s whole body had chilled with fright as Makandal became a hound before his eyes; the type of vicious, tattling hound that the whites would take to hunt runaway Ginen. He’d fled, Patrice had, with the dog after him, moving fast for all that it only had three and a half legs, and barking happily. Patrice had tripped on a root and fallen, and had nearly wet himself when the hound leapt at him. It changed back into a laughing Makandal as it landed. Makandal had giggled and shaken his friend’s shoulders and hugged him, but it was weeks before Patrice had forgiven him for that trick.