Sex and Bondage in Three Colors
by: Dr. James T. Baker
Green Hills Press
Nashville, Tennessee
www.greenhillspress.com
Sex and Bondage in Three Colors: Smashwords Edition
© 2010 James T. Baker
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published with the services of Grave Distractions Publications www.gravedistractions.com
Cover Design and eBook Edition Layout: Brian Kannard
Original Cover Art: Alanna Ralph of Blush Studios www.alannaralph.com
Also by James T. Baker
Thomas Merton: Social Critic, 1971
Faith for a Dark Saturday, 1973
Under the Sign of the Waterbearer (a play), 1976
A Southern Baptist in the White House, 1977
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, 1978
Eric Hoffer, 1982
Ayn Rand, 1987
Brooks Hays, 1989
Study Guide for Jackson Spielvogel’s Western Civilization,1991
Studs Terkel, 1992
Nat Turner: Cry Freedom in America, 1997
Eleanor Roosevelt: First Lady, 1998
Abraham Lincoln: The Man and the Myth, 1999
Andrew Carnegie: Robber Baron as American Hero, 2002
Holidays with Sundae: Conversations with my Cat, 2002
Instructor’s Manual for Cannistraro and Reich’s The Western Perspective, 2003
Documents in American Religious History, 2005
Peter Peacock Passes, 2010
Prior Knowledge, 2010
Sex and Bondage in Three Colors, 2010
For more information about James T. Baker's other works,visit www.greenhillspress.com
Prelude
Islands in the sea, like clouds in the sky, assume the shapes of their inhabitants. Islands resemble fish, clouds resemble birds.
Early mapmakers captured the animated shapes of islands better than their modern descendants. Modern cartographers are too precise, too sterile, too deficient in imagination to see and draw the souls of the small land eruptions in the oceans. Their maps have no dragons or monsters, no whirlpools or waterfalls to the eternal abyss. Their islands do not imitate fish.
Yet there is one Caribbean island so obviously organic, so clearly shaped after the fish that fill the waters around it, that no amount of antiseptic abstraction can obliterate its form. Columbus called it Hispaniola. The Spanish who followed in his wake, hoping to camouflage their hunger for Gold and Glory, named it in honor of their God’s day, Santo Domingo. When it was divided between Spain and France, the western half, French St. Domingue came to be called Haiti after its mountains.
Hispaniola is to the imaginative eye, undimmed by science, the leader of a copious school of island-fishes swimming wildly up from the northeastern coast of South America, heading for the south coast of North America. Her mouth is spread wide, preparing to attack, mangle, and leave in chunks the languid loaf fish Cuba. Her tongue, the Ile de la Gonave, licks with hungry fury; and her eyes bulge in fanatic determination to have the loaf, to rip it apart, to leave the shredded remains for her baby followers, to go on toward her ultimate goal, the phallus of Florida.
Haitians say their island was once a ravenous woman, never satisfied, always on the prowl for still another man to satisfy her insatiable appetite for oral sex. With a legion of men she committed acts that would shame any decent woman; and to punish her, to teach all other women that such behavior displeases the gods, Agne-taroyo, god of the unending sea, changed her into an island, shaped her like a fish, showed her the Florida phallus, and coaxed her to capture and devour the loaf fish Cuba in order to have the strength to achieve her goal. Agne-taroyo tempted and tantalized her with the phallus until she was frantic with nervous desire, until she sailed forward with her host of babies to attack the loaf fish. Then with one sweep of his mighty hand he froze her in place, her mind still on fire, her eyes still bulging, her mouth open for the kill, her tongue licking the water, unable for eternity to move an inch.
Her scales are rough and horny and highest about her neck where the fluid brown Spanish speaking Dominican Republic joins the straining swollen black French speaking Haitian head. The head is a land of sharp, vivid, bewildering contrasts: high, jagged peaks and low river valleys; bright stretches of desert juxtaposed to dark dripping rain forests; hot, disease ridden seaports and cool misty mountains; indescribable natural beauty and incredible human misery. Haitians say that when the gods, sailing in the clouds above the seven seas, first glimpse Hispaniola from afar, they smile and laugh and want to stop for a visit; but when they come close and see the way the forests have been ravaged and the people brutalized their smiles fade, their laughter stops, and they fly on.
Haitians say the gods experimented all one day with the creation of man. First they made a series of brute animals, without a sense of right and wrong, creatures that satisfied their hungers in the simplest, most natural ways. Then they made a series of angelic beings, pure of heart, masters of their emotions, living by logic and reason. Unable to decide which of these creatures they preferred, the animal or the angel, with the sun beginning to set, tired and hungry, they left the two groups by a river and went away. Concerned with other matters in the universe, they did not return for two hundred years, and when they did they discovered that the two groups had mated, their children had mated, that there were a thousand offspring, all different combinations of animal and angel, some more animal and some more angel, all easily tempted to satisfy their hungers the simplest possible ways, all tortured by guilt for what they did. The gods hated what their creatures had become, but they blamed themselves and agreed not to destroy the people, letting them live, occasionally punishing them for their folly, occasionally taking pity on them for their tragic flaws.
Hispaniola’s native Indians killed the small stand of Spanish soldiers Columbus left there, and they were themselves systematically annihilated by the unending flow of Spaniards, Frenchmen, and Africans from across the sea. The French wrestled away the western portion of the island, the high part, from the Spanish and imported Africans to slave in the sugar plantations on which their White masters grew the white powder to sweeten the coffee and tea of men and women in Europe. The slaves came mostly from the convenient African coast of Dahomey. Their religion was Voodoo, which means the Way of the Gods; and their Gods, though Black, were similar to those of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Their masters brought in priests to baptize them Catholic, but after attending mass on Sunday mornings many drifted away to the woods in the evenings to practice the Old Faith.
By 1789, Haiti boasted a population of 570,000, 40,000 of them White, 500,000 Black, 30,000 Brown. Whites, rich and poor, were free; most Blacks were slaves, but two thirds of them were recent arrivals, born free in Africa, now slaves in Haiti; Browns, neither Black nor White but both, were neither free nor slaves but both. Whites spoke the king’s French, the rich more precisely than the poor; Blacks spoke among themselves various African dialects; and all three groups spoke the Haitian Creole born of pragmatic necessity. This new language, African French, was the last Romantic language, nasal and rhythmic, a language perfectly suited to carry messages of love or cruelty or both together, of joy and pain or both together, of life and death or both together, of slavery and liberation or both together.
It was a language strong enough to describe bold schemes and grand dreams, a language to provoke and to inspire. It was the language of a boy named Toussaint, born into slavery, taught to read and write by an aging father, bound to a job so undemanding that he had little to do but dream. Toussaint—all saint---rose from the horse stalls to become Louverture---The Gate---cynosure of freedom for black Haitians. His misfortune was to be a contemporary of two White men, Napoleon Bonaparte and Thomas Jefferson.
Part 1
Plans
1779-1791
-One-
“Oooooooooaaaaahhhhhh,” the soft wail of death swept over the still, sun baked Breda Plantation.
By 9:00 the morning of May 23, 1779, was hot. By 10:00, when the slow procession topped the hill from the Great House and oozed down the gentle incline toward the tiny white chapel in the valley, the temperature was at 95 and climbing.
“Ooooooooaaaaaaahhhhhh.”
Birds in the pine trees along the sandy pathway had already ended their early morning song fest and found shelter from the scorching, sapping naked red sun moving up toward its full noon strength. Flowers had already closed their petals in self defense, taught by ten thousand seasons of struggle not to resist the torch in the heavens, but to hide until evening.
Slaves not given liberty to attend services for the man who lay in the wooden casket at the head of the procession stopped and watched the plodding line of mourners pass, some to show him respect, others merely happy for an excuse to rest and let their sweat cool them for a moment. A few raised their hats in silent tribute, then quickly replaced them for protection against the harsh sunrays. All the faces, both in the procession and in the fields through which it passed, were black.
“Oooooooaaaaaaaaahhhhhh.”
The long straight line of mourners, following the four men in white shirts and trousers who carried the casket, each at a corner, seemed to have been carefully choreographed. No one missed a step. They moved to a regular beat, down the incline, along the powdered path cut through the cane field, into the whitewashed chapel. As the casket and the dead man’s family entered it, a small pump organ inside began to whine. All those who could be accommodated vanished into the darkness of the sanctuary. The last ones to arrive stood outside, in a balloon of multicolored shirts and blouses in the shrinking shade of the bell tower.
There was just enough room for the casket to fit between the altar, the front row of pews, and the side pews, usually reserved for choirs but at funerals reserved for the family of the deceased. The four pall bearers had to slip cautiously beside it to avoid touching the family members who had taken their places by the time the casket was firmly in place. It was considered unlucky to touch a member of the dead person’s family on the day of burial. As soon as the dead was safely in the ground and well on his way to the life hereafter in Africa, it was all right to embrace and comfort the bereaved; but until then they must carry their burden without personal touches from outside.
On the family pews, three on each side facing the altar and each other, sat the dead man’s next of kin. There were twenty of them—men, women, children, grandchildren. First among them was an old black lady, growing fat in her antiquity, as of this moment head of her clan, only recently retired to less demanding chores after fifty years in the Old Master’s kitchen. Her name was Marie-Louise, and her hair was pulled back, black and white strands alternating, to a tight bun in the back. Her face betrayed no emotion. She had withdrawn deeply inside herself, hidden from public view, safe there from the winds of hot passion that washed in waves over the other mourners. Only the regularly spaced batting of her large brown eyes showed that she was conscious of the present reality. Yet there was about her an air of repressed rage that threatened to rise up and shatter the steady moan of the congregation’s bereavement. At any moment, should the gods please to visit her and release her from her self imposed emotional bondage, she might explode, her smoldering volcano of pain erupting into a violence of flame.
The dead man, whose face and chest were clearly visible after the pall bearers opened the top half of the casket, was her husband. Although they had never been legally married, they had lived together for those fifty years of her work in the kitchen, four fifths of her life, not quite half of his. He was over fifty, she was not yet twenty, when he asked the Old Master’s father for her. She cried when Old Master’s father agreed to his offer, embarrassed to think that she would have to sleep with an old man. But he was good to her, he made her happy. Together they produced ten children.
Beside her, to her right, fully aware of the deep grief bubbling beneath the surface of the old woman’s stoic demeanor, sat a young woman, short and stocky, with a round angelic face and large oval breasts that rose and fell as she breathed. She was not a daughter, but she sat with the family because she was the old woman’s closest friend, closer to her than any of her daughters were. Tears flowed from the young woman’s eyes as she held a white handkerchief under her nose and wept for the old dead man who had been an uncle to her and the old woman next to her who had taken her under her wing and taught her the ways of the master’s haut cuisine.
Her name was Suzanne, and only three months earlier she had followed the same pall bearers to this same place to hear the same words spoken over the body of her young male lover. The old woman came to sit beside her then and had comforted her just as she was comforting the old woman now. Beside Suzanne, constantly twisting and turning and disturbing the thick hot air, sat a black tot, her only son, now an orphan, Isaac. From time to time she glanced at him, but she never reached out to still him because she knew he was small and hot and confused by the strange ceremony he witnessed.
Alone on the front pew across from the two women, facing them, pensive, uncommunicative, unapproachable in his carefully cultivated composure, sat a young black man, thirty five years old. He was dressed in the light blue uniform, with white shirt and black boots, of a coachman. He was small and wiry, only five feet four inches tall and weighing under a hundred and twenty pounds; yet the way he sat, even in mourning, the way he carried himself when he walked, made him seem larger. He was the only one of the dead man’s sons who still lived at Breda Plantation. The policy of selling off or trading most male offspring had left only three sisters and himself with his parents. Being the youngest of the ten children and a sickly child, he was spared the auction block.
His eyes were unusually large, and his teeth protruded so sharply that they showed through his puckered lips even when he was not speaking; but he would never allow anyone to tease him about his appearance. He seldom smiled and never laughed. Nature had played a trick on him, had given him a funny appearance, but he would not accept the role of a clown. His obvious intelligence, his haughty disdain for mediocrity, his determination to take life seriously, transcended his physical appearance.
He was born on November 1, All Saints Day, and his father gave him the pleasantly pious name Toussaint. Yet he learned as an adult, when looking over the record book of the plantation, that the Old Master had not even noted his name, just noted that another “male child” was born to his parents. The record said that he was the tenth child, the seventh son, and that he was weak and unpromising. His mother was in poor health during the last weeks of the pregnancy, and this had deprived the Great House of its best cook during the weeks of harvest. Born to aging parents, he was unexpected, unwelcome, at first unwanted; and he knew that he had never been able to endear himself to his mother. The fact that he now sat not by her side but across from her in the church showed that they were still not as close as most mothers and their sons.
His father, on the other hand, loved him dearly from the start. Toussaint’s birth proved that despite his seventy years he was still potent, still able to plant his living seed in fertile ground. In addition, he also recognized in the young man’s sharp eyes and serious expression someone who could be taught trade skills, one whom he could teach to read and write, one who could be trusted to be his companion in old age, to keep his secrets, to remember his prophecies, to carry on his dreams.
At his father’s request, Old Master assigned Toussaint at age twelve to work as a cowherd, a far better fate than being sent to the fields. Since his father had taught him to read, he was permitted to borrow books from the Great House’s library to read while he watched the animals in the fields. He carried out his duties so well and faithfully and was so good at keeping records of feedings and sales that at the age of twenty he was made groom to the master’s stand of eight pure bred Arabian horses. Five years after that, having once more proven his skill with animals, having taught himself many of the trade secrets of veterinary science, he earned the right to drive the family’s coach. Now he was Old Master’s most trusted slave, permitted to remain while the White men discussed matters of business, and the other slaves treated him with deference. His position in the community, plus the fact that he was the dead man’s only son, gave him the right to sit alone in the front pew, even when space in the small building was so limited.
* * *
“Ooooooaaaaaahhhhh!”
The tiny pump organ built in volume, adding to the feeling of congestion in the chapel. Ever louder sighs rose from the people. Heat and humidity pressed down on them like a woolen blanket. Then a shout pierced the air: “Oh! Oh, Christ, have mercy!” A White man wearing a tattered black gown and the remnants of a clerical collar, his bare arms and feet red from the sun, came rushing through the door and down the aisle. “Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy; Lord, have mercy!” he shouted as he made for the altar. The congregation, at first stunned, drew back from him, then sighed in recognition. It was the Jesuit, the one the Society left behind when the French government forced the Order to leave the island. Some said he had broken his vows and was left as punishment. Others said the Jesuits refused to take him with them because he was insane. Still others said he hid when the others were leaving so that he could stay in Haiti. Whatever the truth, he lived among them but outside their society, haunting the fields and barns and woods up in the hills. The slaves fed him, leaving food for him to find like a stray dog, because they feared he might otherwise put a curse on them. Even his insanity seemed to them a sign of divine possession, and they wanted to take no chances with the gods.
Usually they caught only fleeting glances of him as he ran away from them. They expected to see him fully only when at last his body would be found mangled by a wild cat or gored by a bull. They had never seen him even in the vicinity of a church. Yet here he was, at Simon’s funeral. “In the name of the Faaatherrrr---and of the Soooon---and of the Hoooooly Ghhhhooossssttt!” he shouted at them and began to laugh.
Just then the plantation’s parish priest, who worked for the Master and conducted all services at the chapel, a White man leading Black people in worship, appeared at the back door, shouldered aside the men standing in his way, and stared incredulously at the Jesuit. “Stop!” he shouted. “In the name of God, in God’s house, have you no shame?”
The crazy Jesuit stopped laughing and stared back at the priest, at first startled, then with a mocking glare, then after a moment with fear. He looked from side to side, searching for a way of escape, but he saw only a sea of White eyes floating amid the Black faces. He began to dance from side to side, bumping into the casket, unsettling it, frightening the congregation even more. He looked to the ceiling as if pleading to heaven for help, then went dashing down the aisle toward the door, screaming, his ragged gown blowing behind him. As he passed him, the parish priest brought his hand down hard on the Jesuit’s back, and the Jesuit broke through the door, crying out in ecstasy.
The crowd waited, hushed, until the organist recovered his balance and resumed the dirge. The moaning, temporarily silenced by the spectacle of the two priests wrestling over the sanctuary, began anew and grew louder as the priest walked down the aisle toward the altar. The level of anguish rose with each step he took. At the casket he stopped, recited a silent prayer, and looked down at the dead man. On a thick white cushion of goose down, sewn by the women of the family, lay a tiny thin man, smaller in death than he had been in life when he always held his head high and let his chest swell with laughter. Diminished by death, by the escape of his large soul, he looked at peace, free now of the disease that had put him to bed for the last six months, ending only when his stomach burst and sent poison through his body. He fought the entire six months to live, he lost, and now he was gone.
Until those last six months he was a wonder of good health. On his one hundred and sixth birthday, last October, he ate a full portion of goose and sweet potatoes. He then walked three miles through the cane fields with the men guests, leaning on Toussaint’s arm but walking under his own power, telling jokes and stories and making everyone laugh. Then just after Christmas, before the first cool snap in the weather, his knot, long with him, began to grow; he had to go to bed; and in the summer heat he died.
Only Toussaint and Marie-Louise and perhaps the daughters knew that despite his laughter the old man had seldom known happiness. His whole act, they knew, so much admired and imitated on the plantation, was an elaborate hoax. He seemed to be happy. He seemed to get great enjoyment out of telling his stories, many of them about his childhood in Africa, before the great battle when enemy tribesmen killed his father and took him away to the coast to sell him to the strange smelling, strange looking, strange talking White sailors. His stories were full of adventure, they made people laugh and ask for more; but deep inside, while he entertained, he was crying. He hid his anger and passion from his audiences, and only a few knew the truth, Toussaint among them.
Toussaint’s mind drifted with the lazy flies caught against the chapel’s ceiling as they halfheartedly sought to escape the heat. He only half heard the priest begin the reading, singing the words in his high, unnatural Catholic voice. “I have learned in whatsoever state I may find myself, therein to be content,” the priest read. Toussaint smiled. The priest thought he knew the old man so well had no idea how such a sentence irked his father. The priest thought that this philosophy of a Stoic Jew matched the philosophy of a man who had lived ninety years among slaves. Little did he know, little could he know, that while in public view the old man pretended Pauline contentment, deep inside him he followed the unconverted Paul by kicking against the pricks.
“Jean Baptiste Simon,” the priest began his eulogy, “a man born a slave. . .” Wrong, Toussaint thought, not born a slave, made a slave. Sold by Black men to White men. The story so common among Haitians.
“He worked in the fields here on this plantation, accepting his lot in life as the will of God, the father of Jesus Christ, whom he worshipped.” No, he never accepted this lot in life, and he never worshipped Jesus.
“His intelligence and hard work caught the attention of Master Eugene Breda, grandfather to our present Master Eduard Etienne Breda. He served Master Eugene with good cheer and humility as a bootblack and later tailor.” No, not with good cheer and humility, not in his deepest soul, only on the surface.
“He never missed a day of service because of illness.” Yes, finally the priest told the truth. He was never ill until the very end of his life. He remembered how his father said so often with a sharp laugh that he hoped he could catch a cold, a fever, anything to have an excuse to miss work, but none ever came.
“He was such a valuable servant, so gifted in so many ways, that the Elder Mistress Breda loaned him to the Jesuits.” He stopped and cleared his throat, as if to flush away memories of the crazy man. “The Jesuits had just come to Haiti and needed service, and he went to Le Cap to work at their house. They taught him to read and write, and due to his intellectual acuity, he became the manager of their business affairs. For her great gift to the Church, God gave the Mistress Breda a long and happy life on this earth.” Toussaint remembered her quite differently: a wrinkled, bitter, sick, irritable old lady who smelled like raw chicken, she made everyone around her miserable, and they were all relieved when at last she died. The slaves, if not also her family, rejoiced that they would never have to see her again in this life.
“He humbly used his learning wisely, reading only holy books, writing only kitchen orders and prayers. He knew, as a good Christian, that we are on this earth for just a short time, that we shall all die, that eternity is forever, that it is far better to lay up treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust can corrupt than here on earth, where thieves can rob us of all we have.” Toussaint smiled at this, not because its truth brought back fond memories but because he knew that his father read many books that were not holy and because he knew where to find the little tin box in which Simon carefully stored up his gold coins. It was there still, hidden under the loose third plank of his cabin floor. Simon often lifted the plank and opened the box and shared the beauty of those coins with him. They were now his, according to Simon’s wishes.
“When he was fifty years of age, after twenty five years of service to Breda Plantation, after ten more years of service to the Jesuits, he was given a greater burden than any before it, when he was given his freedom.” Toussaint felt and heard the hush that fell over the hot, moaning congregation. Freedom was a word they seldom heard, and never from a White man or woman. They all knew that Simon was free, that he was in some mysterious way different from them, but he never discussed it and neither did they. Freedom: a word both beautiful and terrifying.
“The Jesuits were leaving Haiti, returning to Europe. The future was uncertain. They did not know for sure where they were going, but they knew that wherever it was they could not have slaves there. Because he had been a gift, they could not return him to his previous owners; and so they set him free. He could do as he pleased. He could remain in Le Cap, to sink into a gutter of sin, to sell his soul for a mess of pottage, or he could return to Breda. He returned. He begged sanctuary of the Master. Like the father of the prodigal son of the parable, the Master took him in, gave him a job and a cottage, permitted him to take a companion, let him live as a free, hired man here in this beautiful, wonderful place, where he could enjoy the second half of his life. Here he fathered many children, the last when he was eighty years old.”
Toussaint listened with interest to the fallacious commentary. Simon did not beg to return to Breda. He returned because the Master went to Le Cap and begged him to come home. He fathered Toussaint, who was his last, when he was seventy, not eighty. White men always overestimated the sexual prowess of Black men. Yet no one, not even Toussaint’s mother, seemed to notice the errors. He doubted whether the priest actually knew how little of what he was saying the congregation heard.
“Despite his great good fortune in life, despite the gift of his freedom and the fact that he always had the respect of his master and shared the bounty of this great plantation, he always remained a good humble servant to his Master and a slave to Jesus Christ. He never forgot the injunction of Saint Paul: Servants, obey your masters, as if they were the Lord. Simon was a servant of the Lord in heaven, which made him the best of servants to his betters on this earth.”
* * *
Toussaint sighed and let his mind stray from the boiling chapel to a cooler place.
He was once again in the pond, a thin wiry boy of eight, pushing lazily off from the clay bank into the water, escaping for the moment the torment of the summer sun. He bobbed about, his head above the water level until the sun began to burn his scalp, until it began to make that circle at the top of his hair and started to bore in, and then he took a deep breath and sank below the surface, down into the cool green palace. He stayed down and blew bubbles until the air was gone and his lungs told him to go back up. Up for a moment, down for a time, up and down, keeping an eye on the cows down at the shallow end, udders deep in the muddy water over there. He was sure they would not leave the water on a hot July day, but he checked from time to time.
He came up for a breath of the burning, sultry air and heard someone calling his name: “Toussaint! Eh, Toussaint!” It was Simon, standing over at the other edge of the pond, under the trees. “Toussaint! Come on out, son.” He knew what the old man would say next: “Come on! Let’s do some reading!” He slowly came out of the water, his body and mind both resisting the demands the old man made on him.
“Aw, Simon, today?” he moaned.
“Why not today?” Simon grinned, his white, even teeth reflecting the sunlight.
“It’s too hot.”
“It’s always too hot for you. That’s no excuse. It’s been hot in Haiti for ten thousand years, and it don’t plan to be any cooler. Come on, let’s read.”
Toussaint came up out of the resisting water and stamped his feet on the tiny beach as he walked toward the trees. “I’d rather swim.”
“I know that,” Simon laughed. He picked Toussaint’s short pants up from the ground and handed them to him. Simon also wore short pants, and his shirt was open. His meager crop of chest hairs was as white as the halo fringe around the sides of his head. Toussaint made a face and took the pants and pulled them on. He threw himself disgustedly on the grass beneath the trees. “I know you’d rather swim, my son,” Simon said, “but swimming won’t make you a better man.”
“It makes me a happier man.”
“Yes.” A bee buzzed near them, and Simon slapped it away. “Happier, but not wiser. That kind of happy is for the body only, this kind is for the mind and soul.” He reached in his pocket and produced a slim volume. Toussaint dried his hands on his pants and took it. It looked new and smelled rich. The cover was made of brown leather, and the gold title said it was Selected Essays of Michel de Montaigne.
“From Master’s library?” Toussaint guessed.
“Brand new,” Simon grinned and poked him in the ribs. “From a new box, just arrived from France. He don’t know it’s here. I do the orders, I put the books on the shelves. He never reads, he just likes to look. When we’re through with it, I’ll put it up and get another one. He will never know.”
“How many new ones you got?”
“Fifty,” he laughed with sincere joy. They’ll last us a whole year. Then I’ll order some more.” Toussaint saw the fierce determination that came into Simon’s face when he talked about improving himself at the expense of the Master. Books were supposed to belong to White men. White men wrote them, they printed them, they read them. He was in the business of stealing their knowledge from them. He leaned back against a tree. “Read it to me.”
“Aw, Simon,” Toussaint whined. “Why do I always have to do the reading? You can read.”
“I can,” Simon agreed, “but you need the practice.”
“Just let me read it to myself.”
“That would be all right, just to learn, but you need also to learn to speak, to read and talk out loud, to teach other men. Someday you will stand in front of huge crowds, and you will speak to them as you now read to me. Read with feeling and meaning, and think about what you say. When you have finished five pages, I will question you about what you have read.”
Despite his protests, Toussaint actually enjoyed these sessions with his father. He liked the attention Simon paid to his reading. He liked the sound of his own voice, growing deeper and mellower each year. He liked the smile he saw on Simon’s face as he read, and he even liked the questions Simon asked him at the end of chapters. He liked to repeat the wisdom, say it in his own words, dispute the points with Simon, who always took a contrary position. He was beginning a love affair with words, a love affair made all the more delicious because it was illicit. The books were stolen.
* * *
Toussaint roused from his dreams when the moaning around him grew suddenly louder. The clamor echoed from the four white washed walls on which hung from square headed wooden pegs the carved Stations of the Cross. Tears flowed from the eyes of his three sisters, and at last his mother’s face showed signs of her inner grief. The priest was hurrying to finish the service, to reach a place of shelter, before the inevitable storm of sorrow swept over him.
Toussaint remembered a Saturday morning in the fall of his tenth year, a rare day, when he was permitted to go with Simon to Le Cap for supplies. Simon told Old Master that it would be educational for the boy, good training for the day when he would perhaps take his father’s place as a trusted and capable servant. Old Master agreed, and Toussaint was so excited the night before they left that he could not sleep. Nor did he doze as they drove along the smooth road between the never ending cane fields. He was on his way, for the first time, to the big city; and when he returned he would help Simon carry the supplies into the Great House in full view of the other slaves.
Simon drove the team of matched black horses hard, and they got to the city earlier than expected. He finished the shopping by noon and hurried Toussaint through his lunch and herded him off down the main street to the docks. As he smelled the salty sea, Toussaint’s head began to swim. He had never smelled, he had never seen the ocean. As they neared the docks, as the smell grew stronger, as he saw the dock and the big ships, he began to laugh. He felt his heart pounding. He wanted to sail.
Simon halted the rig and tied the horses to a post. He helped Toussaint down and led him across the pier, where he pointed to the nearest ship. White men were tying her up to the dock. Toussaint read its name: Fair Princess. “It’s just arrived,” Simon whispered. “From Africa.”
“From Africa?” Toussaint whispered back.
“That’s right. It’s full of slaves.”
Toussaint repeated the words, but he did not fully understand them. He knew Simon’s story, how he was captured as a boy in Africa and brought by white men in funny suits to Haiti and made a slave; but he thought that was all in the past. He did not know that ships still came from that faraway place to bring more slaves to Haiti. He knew that Breda Plantation sometimes got new slaves, mostly men but occasionally a woman or two, arriving in chains, but they were always banished to the far fields and not allowed to mix with the older residents, and it never occurred to him that they might be newly arrived from Africa. The idea that free men and women were still being captured in that paradise called Guinea and brought here to work as slaves to make sugar for the White man was a novel idea to him.
“You watch,” Simon whispered, although no one was close enough to hear him, “and you’ll see some of them.”
A ramp was slid slowly out of the ship toward the dock, and White soldiers gathered at the place where it landed to keep guard. Toussaint heard a loud barking command and looked up at the ship, and at the top of the ramp appeared a line of naked Black people in chains. The people blinked at the bright light of the sun reflecting off the water and the white washed buildings of the city as if they had been long buried underground. They looked to Toussaint like new born babies looking out for the first time at the frightening world in which they would have to live.
“There, Toussaint,” Simon nudged him. “See them? That’s you.”
“Me?” Simon was always saying silly, puzzling things like that. It both irritated and intrigued him.
“You. You too came from Africa, just that way, all chained up, you came out of the bowels of a ship like that one, blinking at the sun.”
“I did not,” Toussaint protested.
“Oh yes, yes you did,” Simon said seriously. “You came from your mama’s womb, and for every Black boy that is Africa. You were born a slave, and that means you were born in chains.”
He didn’t understand, but he was so fascinated by what he saw that he didn’t argue. He couldn’t take his eyes off the Black people, coming slowly down the ramp, bewildered, frightened, prodded by White men with crops.
Simon nudged Toussaint toward the dock, where a crowd of people, Black as well as White, were gathering around a big box. “That’s the block,” Simon whispered.
“What’s a block?”
“Just stand still and be quiet and watch and listen.”
Toussaint watched as the Africans, mostly men but a few women, singly and in pairs and in small clusters, were one after another marched up the steps of the box, displayed to the crowd, and auctioned off to the highest bidders by the dirty White man who spoke French with a funny accent. Toussaint later learned that he was Dutch.
Toussaint was at first amused and then chagrinned at the way both men and women were paraded naked before the mixed audience. They might just as well have been dogs or cattle or horses, they were certainly considered less than human beings. He had seen adult Black men naked but only in the presence of other Black men. He had never seen any woman completely naked. Women nursed babies in public, even in church if the babies were fussy and threatened to disturb the services; but not even in the fields on the hottest day would a woman strip naked in front of men or even in front of other women. He could not understand how these African men and women could stand there as White men and women stared at them. The sight of the sagging breasts, the sullen penises, the rounded bellies with their fringes of curly hair both repulsed and aroused him.
One of the African women had especially large breasts, and the dirty White auctioneer lifted them for display and said what a grand breeding mare she would make. One of the African men, despite the chilling effect of being naked in public view, experienced an erection; and the White auctioneer lifted it and shook it for the crowd, causing it to grow twice its usual size, teasing it until it stood out from the man’s body like a drawn fist. The White audience, both men and women, shared the joke and commented on his fitness as a stud. Someone even called out for the man with the big penis to have sexual intercourse with the woman who had the big breasts for the benefit of the audience, but the auctioneer laughed and waved the suggestion away.
Toussaint removed his hat and held it in front of him for fear someone would notice that this thought aroused him so much. He turned away from the block and refused to look for a long time, turning his attention instead to a White buyer going over a large black man who interested him. He felt the man’s arm and shoulder and leg muscles. He forced open his mouth to look at his teeth. He even licked the man’s forearm to taste his sweat.
“Look, Toussaint,” Simon said after he had been silent for a long time. “That one just going up the steps, look at him.” Toussaint did as Simon said and saw an African who was bent almost double. All over his back, his neck, his arms, and his legs were lash marks, some of them old enough to be scabbed, others filled with puss, still others still red with fresh blood. “He won’t bring much,” Simon whispered. “He’s damaged. He will be damaged even more before he is broke, if he ever can be. Me, I doubt he can, I think he will die first.” Simon’s voice sounded so strange that Toussaint look at him and saw him smiling. He had the same look as that man in Master’s Bible, the one who had just been cured of blindness. He looked proud. “That man is what we should all be, all of us who were captured and enslaved and tamed down to be servants. I want you to look at him closely, Toussaint, because I could never show you myself what we as a people ought to be. I passed slavery on to you, just like the sin of Adam, and you can feel the chains on your wrists and ankles. That man will never be a slave.”
Toussaint looked back at the man. The climb up the steps had started his stripes bleeding, and bright red blood ran freely down onto his dusty butt and dripped from there to the wooden block. The man suddenly jerked away from his minder and started to jump off the platform. Three White men grabbed him and held him until he stopped struggling, then forced him back into place. They now had blood on their dirty white shirts. A whip cracked, and the man cried out in pain. Toussaint turned and buried his face in Simon’s stomach, sobbing with a broken heart. All he could see with his eyes shut and his face covered by Simon’s shirt was the man’s blood.
* * *
“The blood of Christ. . .”
Toussaint jumped and came awake. The church had grown even hotter and was now damp from sweat and tears. The priest lifted the cup toward the ceiling. “The blood of Christ. . .” Toussaint heard the congregation moan with sympathy for the Lamb of God who died on the cross to free man from the bondage of sin. The river of tears flowed all around him.
He remembered an evening in September, with the weather still hot. The sun on the western horizon was the color of dried blood. He was herding the cows home for the night when he felt a sharp pain in his foot. He had stepped on a shard of broken pottery embedded in the ground, slicing his right foot open at the tender hollow between the ball and the heel. He sat down right in the pathway and clutched his foot to him as he began to wail. The blood poured out, gushing forth as though long trapped and forced out by an inner pressure. He gripped the foot tightly, trying to stop the flow and kill the pain, but nothing he did seemed to help.
Then Simon was there. Toussaint didn’t know how he knew to come, whether it was by design or just coincidence, but he was overjoyed to see the sympathetic old face. He dropped the foot, jumped up, and threw his arms around the frail shoulders. “There, there now,” Simon soothed him. “I know, yes, I know. Here now. Show it to me.” Toussaint slowly raised the bleeding foot. “Yes,” Simon murmured, “it is bad all right, but we can make it better. Come with me. Let’s wash it off in the stream.” There, to his surprise, as if by a miracle, there was a stream of cool mountain water flowing right past them, one he had never seen before. He watched in awe as Simon put the foot into the stream and as the foot turned it crimson for a time before it gradually lightened and finally was clear again. Simon eased the foot out of the water and bound it in a clean white cloth. The bleeding had stopped. He wiped Toussaint’s tears away and carried him to his bed. In the morning the cows were already in the field when he woke, and he could walk to them without pain. When he removed the cloth later that day the wound had completely healed.
“He shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and they shall know death no more,” the priest was reading. The congregation rocked in passionate delirium. A hundred rivulets of tears flowed freely toward the common sea of despair. Each person in the room had been healed at least once by Simon’s magical powers; and now he was gone. “Oh death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” read the priest. The people knew that without Simon the sting of death and the victory of the grave would be a constant threat.
Toussaint remembered a Sunday morning. It was winter, one of those rare days when people needed jackets, and he was walking with Simon to church. Simon never missed mass, though he told Toussaint confidentially that he was not a Christian. They were at the crest of the hill when Simon stopped. “What? What is it?” Toussaint said, impatient to be out of the chilly wind. “Look,” Simon whispered. “To the right of the door there, see?”
Toussaint looked where he pointed. Three Black men, still in chains, confused and frightened, stood huddled together, partly to keep warm, partly to block the stares of the worshippers coming from all directions. A White man, Tremblay was his name, the most hated of the managers, the one who commanded the field hands in the most remote parts of the plantation, the one who handled the new arrivals, stood next to them with a whip in his left hand. He wore a wrinkled red jacket and a wool cap. The huddled slaves wore only short trousers.
After a long moment Simon took Toussaint’s hand and led him down the hill to the church. They walked slowly passed the trio, and Toussaint never forgot how they smelled. It was a mixture of salt and dust and sweat; yet it was a sweet scent. No sooner had he and Simon taken their seats in the church than they heard a noise from the back door and turned to see Tremblay pushing the trio down the aisle. They looked scared, as if they were entering the sanctuary of a new and terrifying god, the god of White men who captured and chained Black men. They walked, prodded by Tremblay’s whip, as close to each other as they possibly could. “They’re here to be baptized,” Simon whispered.
“Baptized?” Toussaint said. He looked at Simon, expecting to see him smile, to admit that he was joking.
“That’s right,” Simon nodded seriously. “It’s the law. Every human being under the authority of the French government has to be baptized. Without baptism a person has no name, no identity.”
“But. . .” Toussaint said, so loudly that Simon had to shush him. “But,” he whispered, “they’re. . . pagans. They don’t know about God.”
“Oh, they know about God. They just don’t know about Jesus. But that don’t matter. They have to be baptized.”
The Africans stood swaying before the altar. The priest, adorned in his green robe, came around in front of them. They stirred nervously, but Tremblay raised his whip, and they stood still. The organist started a slow, rhythmic dirge, and the Africans began to shake with fear. As the priest read from the Bible, they began to moan and sway from side to side. The priest stopped reading and raised his hand. Tremblay pushed them, one at a time, to their knees, where they continued to shake and moan. When the sprinkle of holy water hit the first one’s head, he drew back as if struck by lightning, and the other two cowered as if hit by the whip. The second one also jumped when the water hit him, but the third one simply closed his eyes and took the punishment without moving. All three of them, kneeling before the strange new God, despite the chill of the chapel, were covered with sweat.
Tremblay got them to their feet, handed the priest a small leather purse filled with coins, and goaded the three men back down the aisle. Toussaint watched them, their shoulders drenched in sweat, their eyes blood shot, as they passed him. One of the men looked down at him and his eyes lingered for a moment, as if he recognized the small boy with the protruding teeth; but then he quickly looked away, as if realizing how foolish it was to think that he knew anyone in this strange new world. The man looked smaller now than when he had entered the building, as if his inner soul had shrunk. Toussaint wanted to reach out and touch him, to stop him and somehow explain what had just happened to him, that someday he would know that the water had saved his soul for eternity; but he knew the man would not understand a word he said.
He looked at Simon and was surprised to see that the old man’s face was grim. He wanted to ask him what was wrong, why he was sad when there was reason to celebrate the entry of three new souls into Christ’s Church; but he knew this was not the time to ask questions. He knew Simon was thinking of his own arrival in Haiti, his own baptism into the Christian faith.
* * *
The congregation swayed and moaned, but Toussaint remained still and silent, lost in his memories. He had always been a solitary person, reluctant to show any emotion in public. He always remained calm, he kept a clear head, he never let anyone know about his private thoughts.
“Toussaint!” He was so startled by the sound and the intrusion that he cried out and began trying to cover himself. “Toussaint, what were you doing?” It was Simon. He stood at the edge of the shade trees, staring at him, watching him writhe with shame.
“Nothing,” Toussaint mumbled.
Simon came closer. Toussaint sat stone still, his eyes half closed, the lump in his pants still large.
“It’s not like you to lie to me, son.”
Toussaint kept silent. He knew there was no way to deny it, no way to excuse it, no way out for him.
“Have you done this often?”
Toussaint nodded and looked away. It was early morning, still cool, the fog thinning, a time when he usually felt good; but now he felt sick.
Simon smiled and reached down to him, took his hand and made him stand. “Come on. Let’s go over to the pond and sit together.”
By the time they came to the water the lump was gone, and he felt better. Simon lowered his bare feet into the pond and stirred the surface. Toussaint followed suit. “It’s natural,” Simon said. Nothing wrong with the way you feel. God gives us seeds, and they want to come out. They stir us up, like I stir the waters, see?” He moved his feet faster, and the water roiled, churned, and bubbled. “We bubble up inside, we can’t be still, and finally we explode, like a cannon. You know what I mean?”
At last Toussaint looked into Simon’s eyes. They were soft, sympathetic, but at the same time serious. “It’s God’s way, all part of the plan. All them seeds, they’re babies; and someday, when the time is right, you’ll get married and you’ll plant those seeds, and you will have sons.” He cleared his throat, preparing for the final conclusion. “Just remember one thing. Don’t ever plant your seeds in Satan’s soil.”
Toussaint stared at him, quaking, as if being initiated into a mysterious lodge. It was so quiet he could hear the birds all the way on the other side of the pond. “Satan’s soil?” In all of their talks, Toussaint had never heard Simon speak of Satan. He often spoke of the African deities, he spoke of Jehovah and Jesus, but he never spoke of Satan. Satan’s soil. He wondered if Simon was talking about spilling his seed on the ground.
“God’s soil is black, Toussaint, rich and black. Don’t you ever, ever plant your seeds in soil of any other color.”
Toussaint understood. He had seen women of other colors, White ones, even Brown ones, when he went off the plantation; but he had never thought he could have any of them, except in fantasy.
“Remember how precious your seeds are. They must bring forth fruit pleasing to God. They must be black. Black people, people that are all African, are God’s true people, Toussaint, remember that.”
“We are God’s people, Simon?”
“Yes.”
“Then why are we slaves?”
Simon frowned, but he was not angry, he was puzzled. “We are slaves, now we are, because God is testing us. One day we will be free.”
“Why are we weak?”
“Weak?”
“Yes. White men beat us.”
“Only because they have whips, and behind the whips is the law, but one day we will break those laws, and we will snap those whips in two.”
“Why are we ugly?
“Ugly?”
“Yes, we are ugly.
Simon raised his hand and slapped Toussaint across his cheek. Toussaint was more shocked than hurt. Simon had never touched him in anger before, never, and this confused him. Then he realized that he had deeply offended the old man. He started to cry. Simon’s angry face softened, and he pulled the boy to him. “Toussaint, oh my little son,” he said, smiling. “I’m sorry. I forgot myself. You hurt me, and I hurt you back. Please forgive me?”
Toussaint wept bitterly on Simon’s shoulder. The sting of the slap was gone, but the emotion of hearing his father ask forgiveness touched him deeply. He had offended the old man, and he was so sorry.
“See, I heard you say what I used to say when I was a boy like you,” Simon whispered. “A minute ago you were me, me as a boy. I saw and heard myself, and I was ashamed of what I saw and heard. I used to think I was ugly, we were all ugly, too.” He too began to cry. “The White man has made us think so. He took us from our homes, he chained and whipped us and made us learn new ways, a new tongue, a new religion, and in it all he made us feel inferior, stupid, ugly. We even believed, still do believe, that those Brown people, those who are half White and half Black, that they are our superiors too. It’s a lie, one big lie.”
Toussaint pulled away and wiped his face with his forearm. “Simon, you promise you won’t get mad. . .”
“Yes,” Simon shook his head. “What?”
“When I tell you, when I do it, sometimes I think of. . .a. . .White woman.”
Simon waited. “It’s one of the women in the Great House. One of the cousins from France. She was here last year, she wore such fine things, she smelled so good from her perfume, and she spoke so precisely, so well. She sang and played the piano, and. . .I can’t help myself, Simon.”