B. R. Smith
It's when the blood moves over the battlefield that I'm in and out of love, swooning and cowardly, wanting to run while my sword feels its way around their guts, searching, keening when it hits bone, the ocean air like a whip across the plain, and me turning sideways, looking away out of politesse, the bile rising to my throat. When I spot General Dessalines he's on his mount in a fallow, assaying the French positions, his nose up and the horse moving right over top of body after body--white, black, mulatto, whomever--his expression one of mild reproach, so the handsome boy on the end of my sword I make an aging governor instead of a handsome boy and so am fine when he collapses at my feet, his blond head quaking, and me not even thinking, yelling to the whites and the dead, "Goodbye! Goodbye!" War is easy. So, on with Saint-Domingue and the independence and the marching and me following the chant of "Noir!" even as my own voice cracks. For hours the flies hiss above the plain, and I fight, dreaming of Dessalines' horse and Dessalines' bedside and praying for camp.
Some nights the drums beat to the hills and my heart readies to burst in my chest for love of body and country, and he's there, wanting me to be his girl again--I am not a girl--when I'd rather be his boy. He's straight-backed and grinning, dressed as if he might adorn a cake, the epaulettes gilded and bright. It's a beautiful country: the mix and match of water and stone, the plain and peak. Nights fall like stiff curtains. And everywhere our soldiers are near us, cursing the French and the slavery, whooping, calling to the gods.
When I was young, before the war, I was treated well. I was to be sent to France, to be educated: I had friends who knew me. I was handsome, irrevocable: time might not have touched it. My mother kept me close, and when I saw anything I saw my life in swaths of gold, like the sun descending on a narrow coast, and believed I would be a great man.
Does this help? The week before I led a small brigade near Vertieres only to have my men taken apart by Minies, giving their lives in glittering bands. Enormous birds in vees came noisily overhead, and we sat in huddles then crawled back through the woods, the men with their faces open and wet and the Minies sailing through the branches in black flocks. Now at camp, I'm skirting the fire drawn by my men, who call me la folle, Lt. Queen or madwoman, ready to be the girl again, home and still everything against me. But I know what I want, so I dance to the drums and wait for the lwa to take me, as the lwa took my mother, making her speak like the gods for the priest's approval, and my eyes roll in my head when I feel the possession coming, and when I look to Dessalines he's already beside me, his voice impatient, saying her name like a question to see if she's here, prodding me toward sleep as I become her.
"Guillemette? Guillemette?"
My eyes close. "It's me," I say. "It's me." His hands grip my arm.
"Petri?" he whispers. "Petri, please go away. You're somebody else now."
And then I am.
*
And as always (this is the joke), when I wake I'm no longer her. I'm myself, my uniform littering the bed, lying in his arms as morning edges along the floor. And though I don't remember the night (what did Mother ever remember: nothing), I feel the ache of its pleasure, and when I look up he's pulling on his breeches, draping a shirt over scarred shoulders. The rain stands outside. From over the hills comes the sound of cannon fire, now and then obscured by the close roar of thunder. Around us the soldiers wake: feet shuffling, low chatter, talking about who they'll be, what's to come.
Dessalines clutches his hands, one in the other, and shakes his head, his face heavy, but the look fades. His arms drops to his sides. "It's been a long night," he says, waving his hand as if to brush me aside. "I need rest..."
Why can't I help myself?
"Tell me," I say. "Why do you put up with me then? What does she do?"
For a moment I'm afraid. His eyes become blank, and he moves toward me quickly as if he might strike, but he sits and tells me of the night, saying that she read to him. When he speaks he talks as if he is a boy--he can be many things, but now he is in love--and he says that she's the only woman he knows who reads to him; that she reads to him out of love because he cannot read. And where am I in this? I want to know, but I'm nowhere: when he's with her they read and dance, and somewhere in the blankness of my brain I place myself in the scene, held without waiting, knowing I'm his.
*
Two weeks later at Crete-a-Pierrot, after having been forced from the plains, we stand along the fortress walls and feel the French shot fly overhead and admire their uniforms from afar and send out our spies and eat mud because there is no food. It's our last stronghold, a vestige before the mountains, so we kill as many as we can and run our couriers north and south for supplies, and I scout and watch the whites as they eat and dress and undress and bathe, my spyglass trembling in my hand. Within our own gates rain runs along the walls in torrents.
On Thursday evenings a boy called Chicken lets me touch his velvet collar for bits of tobacco. He weeps for his brother, who was lost to a skirmish, who was a mercenary for the French, part of the mulatto bands that ambushed us daily in Port au Prince.
The boy stands in the center of a holding cell, the skin of his thighs cold. When I step behind him I curl my hands around the back of his neck, placing one finger after another against him, feeling the softness of the velvet, feeling the warmth of my breath return to me as my fingers brush away dust and dirt.
"My poor brother," he says. "My poor Bobo."
"Your brother's in heaven," I say. "You should be happy for him. He's in a better place than you, no?"
He nods, and from his shoulders I feel the muscles loosen, his back slackening. Sometimes I wondered if his crying isn't for my benefit. He's a very bright boy.
"Now," I say, turning him around to face me, pacing back and forth once he stands at attention.
His face turns serious, the boyish cheeks sucked in and sallow. "Remove your shirt." My own voice echoes back to me, and I barely recognize it; it belongs to a man years older, and my stomach for a second folds, but I look at him standing, no longer a boy, his chin up, the mouth like links of chain, and I see the man he'll be if the war doesn't claim him. My shoulders go back. My chest is buoyed up at the baritone that sounds from my throat, filling the room, coming right back at me, saying, "Wonderful. Wonderful."
When the French finally break through the Crete-a-Pierrot gates we run past them, whooping, leaving our sick and wounded and dodging the cudgels and knives and cannons, hiding Dessalines in our ranks, dressed as a pauper, our hearts barely beating for fear he'll be captured or killed (the fear was with us always), and when we reach the hills safely, for our own survival, we kill the runaway slaves in the hills, the maroons, who never wanted, it seems, to be anything other than maroons, because the French want us to kill the maroons in the hills, and we understand that for a while we have to do what the French want, because we can't fight back in our sorry state. Then after we've eaten and shaved and regained our strength, shed whatever wildness we play at, we're again ourselves and so turn back and fight the French, wanting to be them, to rid ourselves of them: we've all fought the whites. We've all fought the mulattoes and the maroons. And we're always only on our own side, because what are we for if we aren't for ourselves?
*
Oh, our Dessalines never sleeps. When the couriers come at Gonaives to tell us of the president's death and I walk up on him in the middle of the night, he's among a number of glittering candles in full dress--a Bonaparte hat like a ship folding in on itself; a battery of bright metal pendants and tassels--lying on his back in the middle of his tent like a magnificent, miniature city.
"Lieutenant, what do you need?" he says.
"I need friends."
"Sad. Sad. Well, we go to Le Cap tomorrow." His eyes meet mine and lock, and I see myself, but it isn't me he sees, it's her, and for a moment I feel beautiful, but I'm not beautiful because I'm not her.
I'm in the tent, watching him closely. "President Toussaint's dead in France. They posted it for our men to see."
He isn't at all surprised. He looks up and crosses his arms over his chest, his mind working.
"The president is dead." He says it as if performing a line, enunciating the consonance. I know what he won't say: that Saint-Domingue is his; that he'll make it what he wants.
"Kiss me," I say.
His face is tender for a moment, but the look goes away, and he stands and marches to the desk and takes up a large folio and hands it to me.
"What do I do with this?"
"You're strange. Open it. Read it to me. From the beginning, please."
I don't want to read it, but I take it up and open it, the pages cracking from overuse.
"It says: 'The Figures of the Contredanse. One: The Ordinary Round. Two: Hold the arms across and follow the pattern justly, arms entwined and crossed. Three: Counterpoint.' There are pictures here," I say, holding the pages up, the couples drawn in thin black lines. "This is in French--do you want the captions described to you as well, or does this distract you from your country?"
"I want you to tell me: if I step like this, is it right, do you like it?" He places his arms out and moves in the opposite direction with his legs, and without letting me answer says, "Soon, we'll rid ourselves of all the whites, even our own...Here, you love your country. Kiss your country."
He turns his cheek, and I place my lips upon the cool skin and because I can't help myself my hands fall against his chest, and he squares his shoulders and reaches an arm out to keep me at bay, and I topple over and begin to shake, and he says, simply, "No," as if answering a question. "Now, we'll put them in barrels; set them on fire and watch them drown."
There's no fathoming this. When I want one thing he gives me something else.
"You know, she's unlike you. Very light. Your voice changes when she speaks. It becomes smooth and you laugh." There's something in his face that changes, that moves. His mouth extends slightly; the muscles of his jaw tighten. "What happens to you when she's here?"
"I don't know...When I become her, I go to sleep."
"She comes and you go?" he says.
"Yes, but I'm here now." He turns and tilts his head as if he's heard a voice, ignoring my appeal. He closes his eyes.
He says, "You want it the other way around, no? I'm sorry for that," then steps away to a small table and begins picking things up and putting them down: an eyeglass; a quill; a compass.
"Have you heard them say our own General Christophe has become Catholic?" he says.
What does this have to do with me? Before the war Christophe had been an excellent cook. He came every now and then to the Port and prepared birds and cream for the mulattos, and now we find his men everywhere we go, looking strange, dressed like Cossacks. "He's sending for priests. He thinks he'll take my place I think. They all want to take my place.... They say when he prays he drinks blood. French religion. Can you imagine? Look at me."
He puts one foot behind the other and performs a stiff little twirl and the anger drains the energy out of me.
"You're beautiful. You dance beautifully." I say, hearing the weakness of my voice, wanting to say it again, to yell if possible.
"That is your problem, you know. You confuse the two."
*
In the afternoon the palms are on fire, because we burn what we leave behind, and our men are doing their trampling, and among the furor an old white is on the ground, delirious, cooing and petting my boot as if it were a rabbit, saying, "My God. My God. You're beautiful!" and jabbing at me with his saber until, infuriated, I straighten and bring my boot down on his face until he's dead and then am sick all over my tunic. That same night we drive hundreds into the ocean, pitching and wailing, the foam of the waves aloft in great pink puffs, and everywhere in the faces of the dead I see Dessalines' face and can't stop my hands from shaking and so retreat back along the cobbled road towards the city, my mouth tasting metallic, the lights of the homes striking my eyes. I find my way to the place I'm supposed to stay, out of the reach of agents, and when the door opens there's a young girl I've never seen. She ushers me in and takes my hand and leads me to the back of the house; there's nothing here, no furniture, no food. Shadows fall over us, and there's metal glinting on the floor. When I try to speak she shakes her head and points to her ears, claiming to be deaf. I know not to stay. Nothing's right. Her body's wild, and when she walks she's a tremor across the floor, her feet barely rising from the ground. She sits in a corner and closes her eyes, and for some reason I stay, waiting for the agents to come and take me away or kill me. I'm so tired. When I dream that night (how do I sleep?), I dream of my mother feeding me apples, the peels sloughed off in long strands at our feet, and bite after bite, swallow after swallow, I sleep and sleep, and when I wake there in the morning the home is empty and I'm alive.
*
In the weeks following (have I told this right?), our men die and there are no new real men; there are only too young boys and women, and so we buy blacks from the Americans, who send them down in rotting, barely captained boats, and when they arrive, if they aren't drowned or shot, we take them up and feed them and teach them to fire guns, and we run around, all of us, believing in nothing. When we dream we dream of our ghosts, and in the waking hours they appear behind us. Why can't we be rid of them? So we take over the homes of the rich and make the mulatto palaces and the white palaces ours, and their paintings are ours, and their sugar is ours, and their children belong to us, and their wives belong to us, even if we don't need wives or children.
One evening in winter when Dessalines is away in hiding and the French are hobbled with malaria, we have a fete in the mansion of a dead mulatto, Ponsot, and the soldiers raid the neighboring homes looking for clothes and alcohol, and when we're together the feeling is paradisiacal, an enormous affair, and one of the Paris-educated officers sets himself in front of Ponsot's piano and plays beautifully, waltz after waltz. Everyone's tied up in their clothes, peering through glassware at candles to see the prismatic light and taking partners and bowing then waltzing around the house, the air suffused with politeness, an air of fixation in the manners, in the performance. They dance on the porch, up and down the stairs, into the street, where the drums break against the lilting pianissimo, and some of the men begin removing their finery then toss it overhead until a scuffle starts on the marble stairs and like a sickness finds its way indoors, sending bodies into furniture. The piano catches fire, and the fire spreads to the ceiling, and the jacket of the stupid young man I sidled up to out of loneliness suddenly blooms in flame and then is beneath our feet as we kick at it, watching the fire run up the curling stairs, taller and taller. The soldiers that haven't gotten out wave from the windows in bright, gusseted coats while the safe gather outside, swaying with palm wine, screaming "Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!" against the cascading drums, over and over. How is no one hurt, no one dead? After the fire's quelled, somewhere into all of this, Dessalines comes crawling along Rue Davide in shackles that he's made himself of a kind of featureless brass, and in clothes that are barely clothes, and I glow, thinking he's returned to me, and when we gather round him in confusion to pick him up and take the mud off him and dress him and make him right, he tells us to stop and look and think about where it is that we come from.
He stands and shakes his homemade shackles in the air and some of us remember the fields and the governor's shacks and where it is that we come from, as if we could ever be that again, and some of us do no such thing, and for the next few nights he personally leads the night raids riding a bay pony and dressed in sack cloth, and he's the first one to ride in and the last one out, and we know and remember him and we remember ourselves, and when the French regroup and drown five hundred blacks in the port we string five hundred whites in trees, and in the mornings when I wake in his tent I pretend to be asleep and bring my body closer to his, alive in the moment, no longer fearing his death or my own, and not knowing that I'm no longer her, he tells her he'll care for her, and I pretend that he means me.
"Guillemette?" he says. The tent's taught overhead; the sun bleeds through. I feel the pulse in his arms, in his wrists, everything simple seeming. The heart pumping its blood. The earth receiving its light. The ground pressed against our bodies.
"It's me," I say. "Petri." His arms stay but the breathing stops, and the moment ends when he pulls himself back, the limbs retreating, the sound of him rising and leaving me frozen, terrified on the floor when I want him most.
*
When he's made Governor he wears a crown, calls himself Emperor despite the easy familiarity, holds dances daily and leaps into the air, his subjects vibrating, the air adorned with palms--and though my bed is almost always empty I am never not in love. In the palace we weave our way among his cavalcades and hear the news of his generals (who amass, conspiring in the hills) and talk of the farmers' progress, those stars of the nation.
One Sunday into the second year of his reign a group of Polish whites come to receive their thanks (they fought with us against the French Generals Leclerc and Rochambeau), and he bids them to stay, and we all walk out to the sea to drink champagne and dine and stay awake until sunrise, and I see him there, all night: we see each other. The next day (why the next day?) he's on his way to a cotillion in Port au Prince, traveling in the old disguises, dressed as a Madame when Christophe's men take him. It's too late when we get the news, but I take a group and run to Pont Larnage and we gnash our teeth and spit in the wind, fearing what we'll find, and when we get there there's a crowd like a wave, and Dessalines is already in pieces, and people are begging and taking piece after piece. Along the ground hands grab for a touch of lace, and in the air a strand of satin curls down from above, and Christophe's men beat them back, their truncheons arcing. The next thing I know my head is singing, and I'm on my pony carrying his entire right leg, the gore of it streaming down the pony's flanks, and my men are behind me screaming, throwing themselves on anyone who dares follow. And when I take it back I take it to my bed and lay it down and weep and for the first time run my hand along the curling arch of the foot and the calf and thigh and wash it and dry it and feel its weight. And when the light falls I wake in the night (I am always waking in the night) to the sound of the crowds trilling, repeating the news of his death as if with hope, and his thigh is warming my own, and I can see the future, old and dumb, his flesh paling in the sheets, the skin yielding to the slight pressure of my hands before hardening like clay.
