Читать книгу Lydia Bailey - Kenneth Roberts - Страница 16

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Early the next morning we left the stinks of Cap François behind us and set out on horseback across the flat green plain that stretched off and off to distant blue mountains. Behind us, gabbling endlessly, trotted a horde of Negro boys with all our bundles and boxes.

The plain was like a funnel, for there were hulking green mountains on both sides of us—mountains whose close-packed tropical forests steamed as though fires smoldered beneath them. Not only the mountains steamed, but also the road we traveled, and the whole plain through which we rode. I had the feeling of gasping and stifling in a vapor bath; but King Dick and the half-naked black boys who ran and squealed behind us seemed almost cool beneath that broiling sun.

On either side, extending from the roadsides to the foothills of the mountains, were plantations of sugar cane; and the plantation houses set down amid palms on little hillocks throughout that vast plain were something extraordinary. The porticos and pillars that surrounded them made them look large enough to house a dozen families each; and the sheds, mills, warehouses, and outbuildings that stretched out from them were like compact towns.

All the plantations, King Dick told me, and thousands of others like them in every part of the island had, until recently, belonged to Frenchmen and mulattoes who had become fabulously wealthy by forcing hundreds of thousands of black slaves to work in the fields until they dropped from exhaustion. It was those black slaves, he said, who but five short years ago had risen against the brutality of their masters and turned the richest island of the Indies into a shambles of death and destruction.

“Then how did these plantations escape?” I asked.

“Some didn’t,” he said. “Mostly didn’t.” He waved his hand toward the plantations near us. “Four years ago these rackoned and ruined, all of ’em. No slaves cut cane, no slaves clean coffee bushes: no cane cut, no coffee picked.”

“But look at them!” I protested. “I never dreamed plantations could be so rich!”

King Dick wagged his head. “That because of Toussaint. They only one Toussaint. He do what he say he do. Everybody else don’t know what to do or where to go. But that Toussaint, he say everybody on this island going to be free and equal, and he mean it. Not like free and equal in America, where nobody mean it. Toussaint kill and drive out everybody who say black men can’t be free, plantation-owners mostly dead or hiding somewhere. They no crops because of weeds; they no black men working, because of figuring they free and don’t have to.” He chuckled. “Toussaint stop all that, quick. Now all back and better. Reason why? Share profits. All working, all free, all equal, all good, long as Toussaint make behave. Stop Toussaint—boum! She all gone! Stop Toussaint, all nothing!”

Toward dusk we turned off from the hard white road that split the green plain like a white ribbon, and rode toward the mountains that hung at our shoulders like gigantic curtains of purple velvet propped into peaks by invisible poles. Cool drifts of air came down from those wine-dark mountains, and an odor of flowers that brought piercingly to my memory the scent of Maine meadows beneath an August moon.

With the gathering dark, far-off throbbings came from the mountain-slopes, dim throbbings that became louder, that became the sound of far-off drums, drums that came closer and closer, that took on character and personality, that became distinguishable as big, hoarse drums; as smaller, quicker drums whose thuddings were broken by unexpected catches and stumblings; as little, hurried, high-pitched drums, whisperingly babbling and jabbering, like adolescent girls exchanging secrets in the dark.

If there was a place in Haiti where a man could close his ears, from dusk to dawn, to the rumbling and booming, the throbbing and thudding, the rattling and tattling of the drums, I never found it. I don’t believe such a place existed—and a good thing for me it didn’t.

The plantation house of King Dick, which bore the name of Mirafleur, was at the foot of the mountains, high enough above the plain so that the cane fields seemed like an inland sea of green beneath its broad verandas; and beyond the waves of cane, framed between the purple mountains, was the Caribbean, violently blue and streaked like watered silk with breeze-lanes.

Behind the house, extending up and up the slope, were the coffee plantations growing beneath sheltering groves of trees that looked like New England elms and maples; and the bright orange of the coffee berries sprinkled everywhere against the dark green of the shrubs were like flickering fireflies miraculously visible in full daylight.

Thus, in spite of the daytime heat, the green of the plantations and the blue of the sea gave an illusion of coolness; and in the evening the night breeze, flowing down the mountain-slopes to pluck at the jalousies and curtains of Mirafleur with flower-and coffee-scented fingers, was truly cool.

As King Dick and I rode up the slope to the steps of the veranda, I was conscious of Negroes, hundreds on hundreds of them, among the pepper-trees that edged the roadway. They seemed to be in constant furtive and excited movement; and we dismounted at the foot of the veranda stairs to the tune of the tremulous thrumming of three drums held between the knees of black drummers.

Light flooded from the door at the head of the stairs, and outlined against the light was a slender woman with a towering headdress and a gown so long that she carried the train thrown over her arm.

“That my English-speaking wife,” King Dick said. “When I speak Creole I sweat, so Cloryphène do my talking.”

He addressed her formally as “Madame Cloryphène”; and when she came down the stairs with a languid, slinky sort of walk, he said to her, “This my friend, the great M’sieu Hamlin.”

The lady looked up at me droopingly. Her face was dusted with a bluish powder, like the faces of the cream-colored women who rode around the white Plaza of Cap François, and she seemed almost too lackadaisical to speak, though she contrived to murmur, “M’sieu.”

King Dick clapped his big hands before her face. “Things too slow around here,” he said sharply. “Tonight we dance—big dance—big, big dance. We got to see into next week; far away as Jacmel and Léogane; got to find a white lady from America, teaching two white boys.” He turned to me. “That what Mr. White-lace Colonel Lear don’t believe. He say you can’t see into next week with Voodoo.” He turned back to Madame Cloryphène. “Tell Atténaire get me every Gangan, Hungan, Mambu, Bocor anywhere around, and let ’em have all goats, roosters, and rum they need. Tell ’em start dancing quick. Along about midnight, we be out; see how they get along; find out what we want to know.”

Cloryphène ceased to droop and went briskly away, doing a little dance-step at intervals. King Dick led me up the veranda stairs and into a room more like an assembly hall than a room in a private dwelling. It extended the width of the house, so that a breeze was bound to pass through it if there was one; and the furnishings were a mixture of tawdriness and elegance, of cheapness and luxury. There was French furniture, its upholstery worn and spotted; and scattered among the French fauteuils and divans were kitchen chairs. In a corner was a rosewood spinet, beautifully inlaid, and before it a bench that looked to me like a shoe-shining box covered with carpet. Hanging from the ceiling was a chandelier with innumerable glass danglers, curlicues, and supporting cables. It had sockets for two dozen candles, but held only six guttering stubs. Between the heavily barred shutters stood elaborate French mirrors reaching from floor to ceiling, and pinned to one wall was a gaudy woodcut of the young Bonaparte brooding over a battlefield on which scores of heavily mustached and admiring soldiers lay dying.

There were cobwebs in corners and around the glass festoons of the chandelier; and, in spite of the breeze that drifted through the jalousies, the place had a musty, moldy odor.

Before the revolution, King Dick told me, the plantation had belonged to a wealthy Frenchman named Lejeune who had used cow-hide whips on his slaves to such good effect that his yield of coffee, sugar, and rum had been almost twice that of his neighbors. He had nearly died from a mysterious ailment, and had suspected his slaves of making an image of him and sticking pins into it to bring about his death. In an attempt to wring confessions from his slaves, he had thrust candle-ends beneath the skin of their buttocks and set fire to their own fat. He had pushed shark-hooks beneath their backbones and hoisted them from their feet. He had triced them up by their thumbs, tied cords tight around their scrotums, and fastened the ends of the cords to active young pigs. Under this treatment several slaves had died so openly and noisily that French magistrates had been obliged to go through the formality of trying him for murder. Although he was clearly guilty, French logic and realism freed him on the ground that the punishment of a wealthy white would make the blacks lose respect for their white masters.

When the revolution started, M. Lejeune’s slaves had followed their own negroid ideas of logic and realism by seizing him, removing his clothes, and pegging him to an ant hill, leaving his legs free so that their thrashings would irritate the ants and divert his former victims. So suddenly had M. Lejeune’s punishment come upon him that he had saved nothing—life, money, house-furnishings, or family. Thus, King Dick concluded with a deprecatory chuckle, M. Lejeune’s wife and daughters were ravished, his mulatto mistresses given to his former slaves, and the furnishings were those that I now saw around me.

The place was crawling with black servants, most of them pop-eyed little boys who seemed to me wholly useless except to get under foot. King Dick found them irritating, too, for he shooed them away as one brushes flies from a sugar bowl. “These not mine,” he told me apologetically. “They my wifeses’. When I away a day, all they little boys come nosing around, trying find out where I been, who I bring back.”

I thought I hadn’t heard correctly. “All these servants belong to Madame Cloryphène?”

He looked startled. “Oh me my, no! My wifeses! Amétiste, Claircine, Roséïde, Aspodelle, Floréal, Marméline——” He hesitated; then muttered the names to himself and checked them off on his black banana fingers. “Cloryphène, Amétiste, Claircine, Roséïde, Aspodelle, Floréal, Marméline.” He shook his head, baffled. “My, my! That only seven!” Then memory triumphed. “And some Atténaire’s. That make eight! My goo’ness me, I getting old, forgetting wifeses’ name!”

I could hardly believe my ears. “You’ve got eight wives!”

“Eight in Haiti,” King Dick said carelessly. “I got——” He caught himself as Cloryphène came into the room. “Cloryphène,” he said sharply, “I wish to repast, and I want all ladies come right here. Everybody get best-dressed and best-perfumed, so M’sieu Hamlin see everything, smell everything. He my best friend, Cloryphène: my very best friend!”