The Salt Roads Page 11

  The hummingbird turned into Makandal again. As his feet touched the floor, he said, “All you travelling people will help, but where you can’t go, I can go. I can be beast or bird. I can run or fly, and carry my message anywhere on Saint Domingue. I will teach all the Ginen on all the plantations how to poison straws. We will do it all together. We will kill them all. We will watch the backra rolling on the ground as blood and bile runs from their bellies. We will kill them all. We will kill them all.”

  The crowd repeated the chant with him. Patrice felt the buzzing in his head again, the power of Makandal’s words, of his dream. All you gods, could it work? Please say that it could work.

  Patrice held on tight to Tipingee’s hand and together they muttered, “We will kill them all. We will kill them all.”

  They were slipping singly out of the broke-down cabin, one every few minutes, so as not to alert the overseer. There—Patrice saw Tipingee go on her way. As she stepped outside, he heard how the frogs by the river stopped their croaking. It would be his turn next. He waited till the frogs had been singing again for a few minutes, then quietly got to his feet and went to the door. One or two voices softly wished him to go well.

  The night air smelled sharply fresh after the close quarters of the cabin. Ezili’s moon face was low in the sky; only couple-three hours of rest left before they would all be woken for work. Tipingee would be waiting for him in their cabin. He thought of her hard, warm thighs and moved as swiftly, silently as he could away from the river to where the ground became hard-packed earth with clumps of grass and the bay leaf trees wafted their spicy scent into the air. He touched the big sky-rock for luck as he passed. It was still warm with the previous day’s sun.

  A hand reached down from the top of the rock and grabbed him by the wrist. For a wonder, Patrice didn’t shout with the fright. Furious, he grabbed the arm that held him and pulled hard. Makandal came tumbling off the rock, dragged Patrice to the ground with his weight, and lay there, giggling. Patrice wanted so badly to punch him. “What are you doing, man? Eh? If I had cried out, it would have given us all away!”

  Makandal twisted up onto one elbow and grinned at Patrice. His eyes were bright, his face happy. “It’s working, my friend! You see how they listen to me? They think it can work, too! Oh, Patrice, you are a good man to have by my side. Thank you, man! Thank you!”

  He pushed himself to his feet. Patrice got up too, still furious. He headed back to his cabin. Makandal followed. “Just a few months now, man!” he said to Patrice. “We’ll fix them up, all the blasted backra. All of them!”

  “Shh, Maka. Keep your voice down.”

  “Yes. Yes. Must stay quiet.” He turned to Patrice, his whole body quivering with excitement. “But you see now that I was right? See how the Ginen can make up their minds to move together?”

  In the hut, Patrice had been caught up in the thrill of Makandal’s dream, but in the chill morning air, he wasn’t so sure any more. A horrible thought occurred to him: “Maka, suppose it works. Then what? They’re going to send troops from France for us!”

  Makandal laughed softly, butted him in the ribs with the stump where his hand used to be. He knew that Patrice hated that. “I thought about that already, man! When all the backra are gone, we will have their guns. And we’ll have a whole island full of angry blacks; hundreds to every one backra that was ever here. We’re rising up, Patrice! We can fight! We can fight, man!”

  “And what about the free coloured? They’re not going to want to give up their property and their slaves.”

  “If they don’t, we count them as backra too. We treat them accordingly.”

  Patrice remained silent. He concentrated on walking over the bumpy ground without tripping in the dark. Maka had always been a man with strong visions. And he had a way of making them happen. When his hand had been taken off and the flesh above it had begun to fester, Patrice swore it was only Makandal’s will that had made the rot draw back, made the arm heal. And now he didn’t work the fields any more, for his stump made him useless for cutting cane. He had more freedom tending his goats than most of the enslaved Ginen. “And what about me, Maka?” he asked quietly. “That game you and me were playing in there? You made me feel like a fool, man! What that was good for?”

  Makandal stopped. Turned to Patrice. Put his good hand on Patrice’s shoulder. “My brother, my friend,” he said. “You are my general. And I need to keep you safe. The whites must never suspect you. So even the Ginen can’t know that you and me, we’re plotting together. It’s you who will carry word of my plan to the maroons, you know. Think, Patrice! An army of maroons, already fierce. Think what we could do!”

  Patrice sighed. They were near his cabin. He kept walking, kept thinking. He heard Makandal’s soft goodbye, and out of his eye saw the three-and-a-half-legged hound running off to where Couva would be twisted painfully into the stocks, her body cramping and twitching. You gods, let Makandal’s plan work. Let the Ginen cease suffering.

  Word

  I find my way fully into the world! It only takes a minute of Jeanne’s inattention. Music is the key, it seems; flowing as rivers do, beating like the wash of her blood in her body. Jeanne is helping me too, unawares; by humming. She doesn’t even know what the words of the tune mean. She just tries to say them as she has heard her grandmother hum them. That tune is how her grandmother entreats her gods. Jeanne is hoping that she might call on them too; ask them what her future holds if she stays with Charles. Will they marry? She prays and fears that they will. She has seen her mother’s belly stretched out with child, the tearing that nearly killed her when a sickly baby girl ripped its way out of her aching womb. So far, Jeanne has been able to keep Charles entertained with tricks she learned on the docks at Nantes. He, gasping in her hands or her mouth, barely notices that they do not fuck. But if they marry, he might want an heir. And if they marry, Jeanne and her maman will never want for anything again. So, hoping yes, hoping no, she was humming to call her spirits. If not Charles, she wanted her own wealth.

  It pulls at me, that music. The rhythms take Jeanne’s thoughts, drown them for a time in their flood. And suddenly I am finally master of her body.

  Oh, what a wondrous thing, to be dressed in flesh! I revel in the feel of it. I run my hands over our face, smear away the powder and paint and wipe them on the expensive silks of our dress. I pull in air with our lungs, sense the trail of blood through our veins.

  I have Jeanne get to her feet. She never once protests. Her floating mind, caught by the rhythm, isn’t aware that it is being swept away. Still we hum. That chant! Beat, beat. My feet move in time. I let her throat continue the song. Now there are words coming from her lips. I dance. My torso falls forward, catches and holds on the beat, parallel to the floor. Jerks upright again. My feet stamp out the rhythm. My arms make a flourish, a swaying, as Jeanne used to do on the stage. Am I pretty now? Pretty as Jeanne? Am I graceful as she is, unawares?

  A pox on all this cloth! I catch at it, tear it away with our hands. By herself, Jeanne is not so strong as to shred heavy silks. I am. The gown pools in rags at my feet. The stays are next, and the pins that hold our hair.

  Stamp. Sway. Jerk towards the floor. Then up. Again. Feel air on our flesh, cool and sweet as rain. The pounding of blood in our ears comes in waves, crashing against our senses. My hands reach for our breasts, ripe as plums. I hold them, weigh them in my palms, thrust them forth as offerings. To whom, to whom?

  And suddenly, I am elsewhere. Not in that stuffy dark room with its walls that smell of cigar smoke and stale wine. Not in Jeanne. Not in any body. I look at my arms, hands. So pale that I see right through them to the ground beneath.

  It is hot. I am outdoors, somewhere. The green swaying of trees around me, a dirt courtyard, a well in the middle of it. A mean little church beside it. And blacks everywhere. Some draw up water in buckets from the well. Some carry baskets heavy with fruit on their heads. They wear scrips and scraps of dirty clothing. I stop dancing an
d turn in a slow circle, to see it all.

  A rainbow-peopled land, this is; not just African-borns in it. I see white faces peering out of carriages. And mulattos too, running shops, or strolling the streets with parasols to keep them from the baking sun. Some of them, their complexions are as fair as those of Jeanne’s body. Some of the mulattos, they strut proudly as the whites do. All these people, all of them; their dress would be outlandish, antique to Jeanne. What is happening?

  No matter. I dance, dance. I ignore the visions of people wafting past me, and I dance, like Jeanne does. I turn my head, I smile. I gesture, point a toe, extend a long, lovely foot. I had put on beauty as a hermit crab puts on a discarded shell.

  “Maman,” says a child’s voice, “who’s that lady?”

  It is a small mahogany girl, knotted about in rags, who tugs at the hand of an African woman. The woman’s face is frozen in a permanent attitude of suffering. Mathilde, they call her, though that had not always been her name. Knowledge is coming to me now, as it does. The woman holds on to her child as though she can protect it from the world’s every ill. She cannot, and she knows it. Yet for all the drawn look on her face, her body stands straight and tall. She will be dead within the year, from an abscessed tooth.

  The child—Griselde—and her mother stare at me, gap-lipped. Mathilde mutters, “the Lady.”

  And so I learn that some of them see me, those blacks and browns and whites. One or two more stop to point. Most others, squinting, do not see and pause to wonder at the fuss their fellows are causing. I have an audience now! I know what to do. Laughing, I commence to dancing again. More people gather, and more. The blacks among them draw my attention. Even lost in the steps of my stepping and tumping, I can still see them, those darkest ones. They walk with eyes shifting all the time, to see where there might be danger. They step lightly out of the way of the white and light brown ones, duck their heads, and murmur apologies. The lineaments of their faces sketch tales of woe. Why must they live so?

  One of them steps forward; an old black woman in a torn hand-me-down dress. Her shoulders are scarred. She lacks one ear. Her breasts sit oddly plump on her chest; she has never suckled a child. It comes to me that in this place, slave women’s wombs rarely quicken; their bodies are too lean from endless labour, and their masters are not compelled to keep them well-nourished.

  The old woman holds a hand out to me. “Ezili,” she whispers. Her face is transformed with joy.

  Ah, but the rhythm. I sway and stamp before the door of their little church, offer the ripeness of my breasts to someone, to something, coiled powerfully in the depths of my awareness. “Ezili,” that serpentine presence whispers, large as all the universe. “You are Ezili.”

  Who speaks? I care not, can care not. The sun on this body of mine melts the ice of Paris, calls forth the sea salt beneath the skin.

  Thrilled to float free of Jeanne’s head, to be but air, to wander, I let myself drift and disperse on the warm breezes of this place, leaving people pointing at where I have been. An elegant white man who has stepped down from his carriage is making some sign on his body, over and over again; pointing to his forehead, his chest, his left shoulder, his right. I neglect to know what he is doing. I am more interested in those black and brown bodies.

  Eddying like swells in a river, curious, I float in the warm air, over streets and shops and churches, and slaves bent double in fields. I swim in time as in a stream. In seconds I float through days and weeks, see the rains come and go, the crops flourish and be felled, until something catches my interest strongly. I approach the heavy earth again, enter into the house through the very grain of its walls.

  Some festivities here. And something important to the ones who entice me, the black and brown ones.

  Slide

  There is a sound like bells ringing. There is drumming in this place; the booming of the sea, and then the bell-like sound comes three times, and I must go to it. I imagine myself clothed in silks and linens; the proper raiment for garbing beauty—I’ve learned this from Jeanne. And what I imagine becomes so. I am wearing beautiful clothing, formed, as I am, from air.

  I enter inside a lovely house, and find myself more curious than frustrated to be sucked into someone’s head. I can walk and speak among them this way.

  She welcomes me, this one. Even though she doesn’t even know that I am here. Unlike Jeanne, she dreams of being taken out of herself. She has made a good marriage and her parents rejoice, but she is not so certain. The man seems genteel, but he has hairs growing from his nose and a sullen cast to his gaze after two glasses of wine. She fears the cruelty that husbands can freely visit upon wives. Wine has loosened her bonds on consciousness, and unawares, she has brought me into her. An unknowing part of her rejoices.

  This is so different from being rat-trapped in Jeanne’s skull! I still retain some of my power to see all about. And I can make this one do my bidding. I wave her fan about my lovely face, pale as the moon. This is how it will be with me; I understand now. Some humans will offer their heads to me, to take my seat inside. They will slip me inside them, and they will be glad to host me.

  I hold her hand up before my face. Eh! Milky white, with blue veins crawling beneath the skin. Jeanne would give anything to be such as she.

  Where is the matter I have come to see? I make her smile, bid some cheerful farewell to her fellows, those other white women, high-voiced and exquisitely gowned in their archaic dresses. I make her leave the well-appointed drawing room.

  There; voices, men’s. And a summoning. A tinkling as of bells; once, twice, thrice: come, come, come. They want me, in that place. I take her feet there, have her open the door.

  And what a tableau before me! Ah; there is the business that they are about. That one, he is in danger. A luscious game. I step forward, thinking perhaps I might help him escape it.

  All eyes turn to me. I am exquisite, and I know it. “Ah,” I make her voice say. “It seems you brave fellows are having your own entertainment here.”

  “Please sit down, my dear,” says Monsieur Léonard Simenon. “You look a trifle overwarm.”

  I make her pink mouth speak with my words, and I charm those brooding men with my voice, with my breath, salty as the sea, as jism.

  It is I who save that black man; I, myself! And then I leap into bodiless space again, free of her, where I might move as I will. I am clumsy here, jerky as a baby discovering that it has command of its knees curled under its belly. Yet all space and time are mine, can I but learn the way of it!

  I stamp out the steps of the dance—yet there is a rug beneath my feet again. Toss my head—and behold once more the sombre furnishings of Charles’s apartments. Oh, oh; Jeanne is reeling me back in. I am back in her apartments, in her head.

  He is watching; the Charles man. I glance at him with Jeanne’s eyes, yet she does not perceive him. She is caught up still in her own dance. Charles’s face, shocked, is even whiter than its usual pallour. His mouth gapes. Wonder makes his visage ugly, slack.

  But I care nothing for that. I wish to be free! Jeanne and I thump with our heels, toss our torso towards the earth, thrust back with our hips. We shake our shoulders. And still I offer our breasts, promise their juices to someone, something, not him. Oh. Let me be free. Free from this body and its overwhelming senses. Rushing like torrents. Air burning in through my nose, harsh yet needful. The softness of our flesh beneath my fingers. And the swelling joy between my thighs as they quiver; oh, oh.

  “Oh, Jeanne.” Charles’s voice, the shock of his body being pressed to mine, the heat of his kisses, drew Jeanne forth fully. If Jeanne hadn’t woken then, hadn’t dragged me back into her, think what I might have done! I could have danced for them all, those Saint Domingue people in that rich man’s parlour, twirling my hips as Jeanne does. They would have asked me their questions, and I would have told them my answers. Warned that Patrice to ’ware his friends. Told that sad healer woman, that Mer, of a cure for poison. Told that Simenon man th
at sugar beets and angry slaves would be the death of his profit. I would have danced, and they would have worshipped me.

  Screaming in frustration, I sink once more to the cage of Jeanne’s brain.

  “What?” said Jeanne, shoving Charles away. Still he tried to work his lips against her shoulders, her breasts. She kept him off. “It worked? They heard me?” She looked around her, to see if her grandmother’s gods had rained wealth at her feet. Then she noticed the foamy mess of torn cloth on the ground. “What . . . Charles, what you did?”

  “My God, Lemer! That dance; what was it?” He brushed a hand down her naked, wet stomach, pulled at her pantalettes. His touch made her skin prickle in distaste. “You’ve never done anything like that on stage! So wonderfully lewd!”

  “Don’t touch me.” She pulled away, repelled by his hand so hot on her body. “It’s to dance alone.” Had she been dancing, then? What dance? To what music? She frowned. “I mean . . . I don’t quite know what I mean.” She stumbled, sat plumb down on the floor. “Oh, I’m so tired. Charles, what happened? Why you ripped my clothes like this?”

  “Why did you rip my clothes like this,” he corrected her automatically. He squatted down, put himself level with her, and took her chin in his hand. She jerked away. He frowned, but didn’t complain. “Jeanne,” he said eagerly, “you must tell me. What was that dance? Can you perform some more of it for me?”

  She felt heavy. Dragged down. Only wanted to sleep. It hadn’t worked. Still more of this life for her. “I don’t know about no dance, Charles. Please fetch a robe for me. And let me rest, just a little. Please?”

  His face was slack with awe now. “You were like a very serpent, Jeanne. Twisting and turning . . .” He touched her shoulder, reverently, as though she were a statue from antiquity. “Such grace. Like a snake. So sinuous.”