Caribbean: a novel Part 28

The speed with which these various manifestations struck, one cascading upon the other, was appalling, death often coming within three days of the first attack, and once the disease started, there was no known cure; sometimes-at least often enough to keep hope alive-the disease dissipated of itself, rest, sleep and good diet aiding the process, and then the patient was immune for the rest of his life. And that was what differentiated old-timers in the colony like General Vaval and his black troops from General Leclerc's French newcomers: the blacks, having had mild attacks when young, were immune, while Leclerc's men from northern climates were pitifully susceptible.

The fatalities were much worse than Vaval had suggested that night in his talk with Toussaint: of an average thousand-troop unit, eight hundred fifty might die, a hundred might be in a hospital of some kind, leaving fifty, if the commander were lucky, available for limited service, limited because a mild form of the disease might be enervating them. It was a monstrous affliction, and when fresh troops were imported from Europe, they provided not replacements in the line but merely new targets for the mosquitoes.

So the betrayal of General Toussaint accomplished little, for although some black units did defect to the French in hopes of landing decent work when the civil war ended, stubborn patriots like Vaval retreated to forest refuges, emerging stealthily now and then to punish careless French units. And they maintained relentless pressure by initiating their own imaginative responses when the French committed barbarities against them.

At Port-au-Prince, the French defenders of the town-a.s.sisted as always by the free-coloreds who still trusted that if they helped the whites when the latter were in trouble, the whites would accept them as equals when the trouble ended-thought to discourage Vaval by erecting a tall gallows at the edge of town where the black troops could see the hangings; there each day at noon they executed a black prisoner. Vaval told his men: 'Erect me a tall gallows on that rise and fetch me all the white prisoners we have,' and next day at noon, after the whites in the town had hanged a black, the blacks outside did the same to a white. After three days of this, Vaval summoned all his white prisoners and told them: 'Write your names on this list, then nominate one of your group to take this message into town: "We can play this game as long as you. Here are the names of the next to go." ' And the public hangings stopped.

The extent to which St.-Domingue had become a phantasmagoria, without reason or justification, was ill.u.s.trated in General Vaval's experience with the Polish Second Battalion. Napoleon, deeply worried about the possibility that his Polish troops serving in Europe might turn their energies to establis.h.i.+ng a free Poland and stop fighting for France, impulsively decided to s.h.i.+p them all off to St.-Domingue to a.s.sist Leclerc. Five thousand Poles, unaccustomed to and fearful of the tropics, debarked at Cap-Franais in late 1802 and were thrown immediately into action against the black troops of Toussaint's successors.

After a series of skirmishes in which the Poles fought reasonably well, they found themselves supporting French troops in a beautiful town overlooking the Caribbean, the seaport of St.-Marc, where they, the Poles, were forced to become the villains in a cruel conflict. A black general who had been fighting as a trusted ally of the French suddenly decided that a brighter future awaited him if he and his men switched over to General Vaval's slave army. This was a prudent decision, but in leaving, he abandoned one unit of his army containing over four hundred black troops stationed inside the town of St.-Marc in the midst of the French and Polish units.

When the French general commanding the Polish battalion was apprised of his former colleague's shameful act-his taking more than half the combined army over to the enemy-he gave crisp and secret orders to his subordinates: 'The blacks out there don't know yet what's happened. Quick, disarm them and a.s.semble them in the public square.'

Quietly, his junior officers, all French, explained to the blacks: 'The general wants to talk with us about the forthcoming attack. Stack your guns and follow us.' When the trusting blacks obeyed, moving forward to hear the general's plans, they heard him cry to his own men and the Poles: 'Close ranks!' and around the perimeter of the beautiful square the armed French and Polish soldiers formed a rigid barrier, bayonets pointed outward. Then came the quiet, dreadful order: 'Men, kill them all!'

It was done with bayonets, but only by the Poles, while the French stood, prepared to use their guns if any blacks escaped. It was grisly, horrible, and swift. Unarmed men were gutted with one powerful swipe, or took bayonet thrusts to the heart, or fell wounded to their knees to be clubbed to death. Those few who managed to dash into nearby houses were dragged screaming back into the square, where they were stabbed as they knelt, begging for mercy. Not one black soldier escaped and not one French soldier had to fire his gun. The Polish troops did it all.

When news of the ma.s.sacre reached General Vaval, who had been waiting to welcome the detachment into his army, he was revolted. 'Who did the killing?' he demanded, and when someone said: 'The Polish battalion,' he remained silent for a long time, then said: 'They shouldn't even be here. Yellow fever will kill half of them.' Then he took an oath: 'I shall hunt them down, man by man,' but his informant added: 'I was there, sir. It was the French general who gave the order and the French soldiers who lined the square.'

'Naturally,' Vaval said, but nevertheless, in subsequent months, he sometimes marched far out of his way in hopes of coming to grips with that murderous Polish unit. He did not succeed, but spies informed him from time to time that these Europeans were succ.u.mbing to the ravages of yellow fever even faster than he had predicted: 'Two out of three Poles are either dead or in the hospital.' But his dogged tracking of their movements continued.

More than a year later, when his slave army had been victorious in many battles and when he was considered by the ma.s.s of blacks to be their finest general, he was on a drive which carried him to a mountainous corner of his old Colibri Plantation. As his aides were pitching his tent, a spy brought disturbing news: 'Troops occupying that high hill. Guns all pointed this way.'

Vaval studied the height: 'We'd lose lives trying to take that one,' and then the spy said: 'The soldiers are all Polish. Second Battalion.'

When Vaval heard this he was paralyzed with indecision. Those men up there were the vicious crew who at St.-Marc had ma.s.sacred defenseless black soldiers. Those Poles had outraged decency and the rules of war, and they deserved to die, which they surely would if he surrounded the eminence to prevent escape and then launched an a.s.sault upon it. But if he did, he would lose many of his best men, and uselessly. For once he did not know what to do, for he feared that if he ordered a costly a.s.sault at dawn, he would be doing so only to settle old grudges, and to lose good men that way would be dishonorable.

So at midnight, with the moon dropping low toward the horizon, the black general asked for three brave volunteers to move ahead of him with torches showing that he was carrying a white flag, and when the party was formed the four marched into the night: 'Truce! Truce! We want to save your lives.'

As they reached the point where the path started climbing sharply upward, they were challenged by French troops led by a lieutenant who came forward, gun at the ready, to parley. At this point the black soldiers quickly thrust their torches into the ground and leveled their own guns at the Frenchmen.

'I am General Vaval.' The torches lit up his grave, determined face. 'I come to offer you honorable terms to get off this peak. Who's in command?'

'I'm not allowed to say. But he's a colonel. Good fighting man.'

'Tell him he can accomplish a good thing if he'll talk with me ... an honorable thing.'

The lieutenant gave an order to his men waiting behind him in the darkness: 'Three step forward. It's a legitimate truce party,' and when they appeared, to face the black soldiers, he and one of Vaval's men disappeared up the hill.

'What will happen?' one of the black soldiers asked, and Vaval replied: 'Common sense will win out, I hope.'

Rather promptly the French lieutenant and the black soldier came down the hill, bringing with them four well-armed white soldiers, in the midst of whom came a Polish officer, who said stiffly: 'Colonel Zembrowski, Polish Second Battalion.'

Vaval moved forward, extended his hand, grasped the Pole's in a warm clasp, and asked: 'May we talk alone?' When they moved to a hill with guns from every direction pointed at them, Vaval remembered the dignity with which the English officers had treated him, and his first thought was: I must do no less. And so he said: 'Colonel, as you no doubt saw before sunset, we have enough troops to take this hill.'

Very calmly Zembrowski, a man in his late thirties and far from home, said: 'And you surely saw that we have the men and ammunition to make that very costly. That must be why you're here.'

To the Pole's surprise, Vaval changed the course of the conversation completely: 'How is it going?' and Zembrowski, as soldier to soldier in a moment of military frankness, repeated almost to the word what Vaval himself had said months ago: 'We should never have been sent here. Napoleon was afraid of us.'

'Fever?'

'We came with five thousand. Now we have not quite one thousand.'

'The British had the same experience when they tried to defeat us.'

'And you? Shall you win a nation for yourselves?'

'We already have.'

'We should never have tried to stop you. But in the end, Napoleon will.'

Quietly, but with enormous conviction, Vaval replied: 'Even he will fail. The whites tried, and we overcame them. The free-coloreds tried, and we drove them into the ground. The Spanish tried, the English too, you Poles and even traitors within our own group tried, and they've all failed.' Then the harshness in his voice vanished, and he said with deep regret: 'Even the French tried ... to destroy their own children. Napoleon sent his legions against us, and soon they'll be leaving forever.' He stopped in the darkness and looked at his black soldiers with their torches and the Poles with theirs, then said: 'I've never understood why the fever kills whites and leaves us alone.'

Then Vavel asked: 'How is it ... your soldiers fighting alongside the French?' and Zembrowski replied: 'The French don't like Poles, but of course they don't like anybody. The generals, though, they're brilliant. Trained. They know history. They study terrain carefully.' He broke into a soft chuckle: 'Mind if we sit? My left leg took a small shot.'

When they were perched on rocks, he laughed outright: 'Sometimes I don't blame the French. One general came to me with a piece of paper: "What are we going to do about this, Zembrowski?" and I saw that he had written the names of two of my junior officers: dblo and Szczygiel. "We can't handle names like that," and I said: "We'll make the first one Dupont, the second Kessel." '

After a pause he said: 'They can't accept us. Because we don't do things their way, they're quick to call us cowards. Claim we don't do our share of the fighting. When our men hear this, when I hear it, we think our honor has been smeared, and to a Pole honor is everything.'

For some moments, as the torches flickered, the two soldiers looked only at moving shadows, then Zembrowski felt compelled to speak honestly out of his respect for this powerful black general: 'Perhaps you know that our battalion was at St.-Marc?' and Vaval replied: 'Yes, I've been trailing you ever since, hoping to catch you like this.'

'You know, of course, that it was French officers who gave the commands? Threatened to bayonet us if we didn't bayonet you.'

'I supposed so,' Vaval said sternly, at which Zembrowski dropped his head in his hands. 'Dishonored. General Vaval, we dishonored ourselves that day and I pray you can forgive us.'

'I have ... tonight ... meeting you on the battlefield, man to man. But in this colony, as you yourself say, Poles are without honor.' He hesitated, then rose and started back to the troops, but as they walked together he said: 'In the morning, of course, we shall come up and take this hill,' to which Zembrowski made a strange reply: 'General, you're a man who has kept his honor intact. I beg you, do not lead your troops tomorrow. Do not.' He said no more, but as they stood under the torches for their farewell, Zembrowski reached out impulsively and embraced his black enemy.

Early next morning when the former slaves, with Vaval in the lead, climbed up the hill to wrest it from the Poles, they were astonished to see two French officers running down toward them, waving white flags and shouting: 'We surrender! Flag of surrender!' and they had scarcely reached the bottom, their faces white with fear, when a series of t.i.tanic blasts enveloped the top of the hill, shattering it and killing every soldier there, including Zembrowski.

The honor of the Polish troops, whatever that means, had been restored. Rather than surrender, they had blown themselves to eternity.

Despite the stubborn heroism of generals like Vaval and the ravages of General Yellow Fever, Leclerc was painfully carpentering a victory pretty much along the lines Napoleon had laid out; black units, seeing the futility of trying to oppose the entire French empire with its endless resources, were beginning to defect in huge numbers, so that even an improvising genius like Vaval had to realize that defeat was at hand. The French were too strong, Leclerc showed a fort.i.tude no one had expected, and the black cause seemed doomed.

French victory would probably have been attained had not Napoleon, believing that he had unlimited power over men, issued the appalling decree which restored slavery in Guadeloupe. This devastating news, which up to now Leclerc had kept suppressed in his colony, seeped out, and now the blacks could not blind themselves to what lay ahead, especially when refugees from Guadeloupe at the eastern end of the Caribbean arrived with tales of what disruptions had occurred on that island when slavery was reinstated.

Leclerc, still trusting that he could dominate the slaves, a.s.sembled all his senior officers at the chteau to inform them: 'I'm sure one more push will do it. I'm heading into the mountains to catch that d.a.m.ned Vaval,' but before departing on what he hoped would be his final maneuver, he told Espivent: 'Look after Pauline for me,' and off he rode.

Espivent, standing in his gateway, watched as the gallant general headed for the mountains where Vaval waited, and was swept by feelings of compa.s.sion and remorse: We laughed at him when he landed. Napoleon's brother-in-law, a know-nothing, make-believe general. But by G.o.d he drove Toussaint into surrender and he's pinned down that pesky Vaval. And as he rides off to his final battle, he leaves here in my house ... what? A brothel superintended by its only occupant, his wife.

As soon as Pauline was certain that her husband was securely gone into the hills, she began entertaining a series of his officers, and was so blatant about her upstairs sessions-a different man every three days it seemed-that Espivent felt he had to intervene, for it was his chteau that was being contaminated and his friend's honor defiled: 'Good G.o.d, madam! Can't you control your appet.i.tes?' But even as he reprimanded her he was uncomfortably aware of her dark Italian beauty. She was twenty-two that turbulent year, a gorgeous human being who knew full well her effect on men and her skills of coquetry.

'Now, Seigneur Espivent,' she said gently, biting her left thumbnail, 'you're certainly not talking about the last century, are you?'

'I'm talking about all centuries. About the dignity of France. About the sister of the chief of state. And especially about the honor of a brave husband who is absent leading his troops into difficult battle.' As he thundered these words he was dressed in a red skullcap and one of his blue capes, and with his neatly trimmed Vand.y.k.e and flas.h.i.+ng eyes, he could have been mistaken for some moralist of a preceding century, but he had little impact on Pauline, who that very afternoon entertained a colonel from Espivent's hometown of Nantes.

During this a.s.signation he remained on the ground floor, pacing in such a growing rage that when the colonel descended, smiling and adjusting his sword, Espivent jumped out to bar his way: 'If you ever step into my house again, sir, I shall kill you.'

'What are you saying?'

The altercation brought Pauline down from her well-used bedroom, and stepping between the two men, she demanded: 'What goes on here?' and Espivent said through clenched teeth: 'If he comes here again on such a mission, I shall kill him.'

'Are you crazy, old man?' she shouted, and in growing anger he shouted back: 'Leave my house. I've protected this chteau through fire and riot and disorder, and I will not have it dishonored in my final days.'

The imbroglio ended with Espivent saying righteously: 'I shall inform General Leclerc,' at which Pauline and the colonel could not refrain from laughter, but they did have the decency to refrain from sneering as they giggled: 'He's always known.'

Espivent did fully intend to clear this disgraceful matter with Leclerc when the latter returned, but in the middle of October 1802, a brief eight months after his arrival at Le Cap, the general, while on a chase after Vaval, felt the onset of a virulent fever, and turning to his aide, he gasped: 'I think it's got me.'

He was rushed from the battlefield to the Espivent chteau, but by the time he reached there his exhausted body had pa.s.sed into the second and third stages of the dreaded disease, and everyone who looked at his ravaged face and twitching body knew that recovery was impossible. Now Pauline, confronted with the certainty that this honorable man whom she had so abused was dying, became a true sister of Napoleon, fighting the disease with her constant ministrations and ignoring the warnings of her friends: 'But, madam! You may become infected yourself.'

'He needs me,' she said defiantly, and through the long tropical nights she bathed his fevered body and did what she could to alleviate his pains. But on the fifth morning, when he began to hemorrhage from the mouth, she screamed for Espivent: 'Help me!' and together they wiped the blood from his face, but to no avail. Charles Leclerc, who had proved his valor in the most unrelenting corner of the French colonial world, was dead at the age of thirty.

Four officers were a.s.signed to accompany the cadaver and Pauline Buonaparte-she spelled her name the Italian way-back to France, and during the extended voyage, for the French s.h.i.+p had to dodge English prowlers, she found solace with three older officers, each of whom had been her lover at Le Cap. An officer, who was never invited to her cabin, was heard to say to one of the sailors: 'Looking at those four, I feel like the fifth wheel on a cart,' and when the sailor asked what he meant, he said: 'I've never been part of their merry games,' and the sailor asked: 'Would you like to be?' and the complaining officer laughed: 'Who wouldn't?' and the sailor said: 'Trip's not over.'

When the funeral s.h.i.+p reached France, Leclerc was buried with the honors he had won as a courageous fighting man, and Napoleon paid him respect, but the latter's attention was on other matters, for when he realized that he might lose St.-Domingue, he quickly disposed of the other prospering colony he held in Louisiana, selling it at a shockingly low price to President Jefferson of the new American Republic, for in his opinion, probably correct, Louisiana without St.-Domingue as a way station to support it would be indefensible.

He also attended to his rambunctious sister, finding her with amazing celerity an Italian n.o.bleman, a member of the great Borghese family, as her second husband. As a gesture of appreciation, young Borghese sold Napoleon for pennies the vast Borghese collection of art and supervised its removal to Paris. To reciprocate, Napoleon made Pauline a d.u.c.h.ess, but this only served to spur her bedroom activities.

With Leclerc gone and the bulldog Vaval still at large, command of the French troops in St.-Domingue fell into the hands of the son of an ill.u.s.trious general who had helped the American colonies win their independence. Donatien Rochambeau turned out to be one of the horrors of the Caribbean, known for his disgraceful behavior and his Nero-like propensities.

To strike terror into the hearts of Vaval's black remnants still opposing the French, he imported from Cuba a large number of savage dogs specially trained to attack Negroes, introducing the animals at a gala evening performance attended by eager whites. Three black men, stripped to the waist, were brought into an enclosed s.p.a.ce, and while they huddled together, unaware of what was about to happen, hatches were thrown open and the dogs leaped into the arena. But they were quickly greeted by a chorus of booing, for the dogs merely sniffed at the blacks, circled them, and withdrew to fight among themselves.

Rochambeau, infuriated by the cries of derision, shouted to his soldiers: 'Draw some blood. That'll get them started,' and men with bayonets went out, protecting themselves from the dogs who wanted to attack them and not the blacks, and jabbed at the bellies of the three blacks until blood spurted, whereupon the dogs leaped at the men, tore them apart, and devoured them. The audience applauded.

Like Leclerc before him, Rochambeau was domiciled at Espivent's chteau, where nightly he was encouraged by the owner to continue his a.s.saults on blacks and free-coloreds: 'I must show you my studies, General. How one drop of black blood contaminates a family through thirteen generations, 8,192 descendants. So anything you can do to eliminate blacks and even part-blacks is commendable,' and these two patriots, representing not more than 40,000 whites among nearly 500,000 blacks, seriously believed that through terrorism they could control the blacks and force them back into slavery: 'Finest thing Napoleon's done so far, General, is the reintroduction of slavery, but we may have to kill off all those who knew freedom under Toussaint and that infamous Vaval. They won't surrender, so don't hold back.'

Espivent applauded when his new friend disciplined a fractious black brigade in a manner that General Leclerc could not have approved. The hundred or so black would-be mutineers were marched to the public square, surrounded by French soldiers with rifles at the ready, and forced to watch as their wives were then brought into the square and executed in various ways, one by one. Then the guns were turned on the men, and all were slain.

Espivent himself partic.i.p.ated in a general elimination of any Cap-Franais blacks who were reported by white informants as 'being so badly infected with the disease of freedom that they will never again make good slaves.' He set up an open-air office on the docks and from it directed some eight thousand blacks to board s.h.i.+ps that would, he promised, 'take you to freedom in Cuba.' When the s.h.i.+ps were loaded, one by one, they sailed about a mile out into the bay, where sailors armed with guns and swords killed the blacks, pitching their dead bodies into the sea at such a rate that the nearby sh.o.r.es were lined with decomposing corpses. Espivent remedied this unfortunate development by instructing the captains: 'Sail your s.h.i.+ps farther so the currents will carry the bodies out to sea.'

Espivent did not personally partic.i.p.ate in one of the more ingenious a.s.saults on blacks, but he did provide a slaving s.h.i.+p for the experiment and supervised the engineering details: belowdecks a small furnace was erected in which wet sulfur could be burned, and the prodigious amount of smoke it produced was then conveyed by pipes into a lower hold where the blacks were crammed. One potful of burning sulfur gave off enough gas to suffocate sixty blacks, killing them without the waste of bullets or the construction of gallows.

But these atrocities, and there were others, gained Rochambeau nothing, for whenever a new one was reported to General Vaval in the mountains, he listened, did not interrupt, bowed his head and clenched his fists till the nails bit into his palms-and dedicated himself even more furiously than before to a single task: 'We shall evict every Frenchman from this colony. There can be no negotiation, no truce.' Ten years before, he had not even known words like evict and negotiation, but now he was using them fluently to help build a new nation.

Each night before his men launched some paralyzing move against Rochambeau's forces, he moved among them, saying in his soft voice: 'Tomorrow we win Toussaint's victory for him,' and next day when he struck, his drive was so relentless, so composed of cold fury, that the French could not withstand the waves of destruction that crashed down upon them. Toward the end of 1803 an infuriated Rochambeau told his generals: 'Dammit, there's no handling that little fiend,' and one afternoon he simply gave up the effort. There was no grandiloquent gesture, no honorable acknowledgment that the blacks had won. He simply called in his s.h.i.+ps, then spent a night drafting a report to Napoleon explaining how, through trickery and deceit, Vaval had gained a few unimportant skirmishes but would have been totally defeated had not yellow fever intervened.

At the railing of the last French s.h.i.+p to leave St.-Domingue stood Jerome Espivent, headed for exile from the colony he loved. He was now in his sixties, his hair and Vand.y.k.e completely white. He had about his shoulders one of his black capes, and in his eyes there was a mist of profound regret as he watched his stone chteau growing ever smaller. 'We should never have lost that land,' he said to a young officer from the Loire Valley. 'It was all because of the free-coloreds,' he added, and when he turned back to see Le Cap, both it and his mansion had disappeared from view.

The attempt to whip the blacks of Toussaint and Vaval back into slavery had failed. The great Napoleon, having lost the richest colony in the world and nearly a hundred thousand of his best European troops, would now turn his attention to his own coronation as emperor and his chain of rampages through Europe, culminating in his retreat from Moscow. In his immortal journey he would humble a dozen kings and humiliate a score of generals, but he managed to outsmart the slave Toussaint only by an act of trickery and dishonor, while General Vaval defied him to the end.

In 1804, Cesar Vaval, like the Roman general Cincinnatus in 458 B.C., retired to his land after a chain of significant victories and the establishment of the only black republic in the world. Since he had been a slave in its fields, he was ent.i.tled to claim the entire Colibri Plantation of Espivent, but he took only the western portion, the part that contained the hill on which the Polish troops had chosen ma.s.s suicide rather than surrender. There he lived with his wife and three children, and sometimes in the evening he told them not of his own exploits, which he felt had been duplicated or excelled by several of Toussaint's other generals, but of the extraordinary heroism of his father, the slave Vavak on the Danish plantation. And as he did so, the past became very real for his children. They could visualize themselves in Africa, or under the Danish lash on St. John, or in a small boat escaping to Puerto Rico and on to Haiti. Vaval drummed into them that they were descendants of exceptionally heroic people, and they felt obligated to sustain the tradition. Of their father's heroics during the war of liberation they never spoke, nor was there need, for it was a.s.sumed that they would behave as he had.

Now, as a man nearing fifty, he was not happy with what he saw in his new nation. One of Toussaint's vindictive generals, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, had recently proclaimed himself Emperor for Life. And what a vicious man, Vaval thought one evening as he sat atop the Polish hill. Last year Dessalines had broadcast an amnesty to all the islands of the Caribbean and even to South Carolina: 'You whites who fled Haiti, come home. The past is forgotten. Come back and help us build a great new nation!' They came back, yes they did, white people homesick for the colony they had loved. And what happened when they got here?

Vaval sat for some time, head bowed, as he recalled those terrible scenes. When Dessalines had them all in hand, he proclaimed one morning: 'Death to every white man in Haiti!' and the killing began. At Cap-Franais, the place they now call Cap-Hatien, he lined up hundreds of whites. They thought he was going to lecture them about their duties as citizens in the new nation. No, no! He murdered them all, maybe four hundred, maybe five. 'Cleansing the nation,' he called it, and every white in Haiti was slain.

As night began to fall, Vaval looked toward Cap-Hatien and wondered: Can horrible betrayals like this ever be cleansed from a land? Are there certain crimes that can never be expiated? And then, because he was a man of honor, he had to acknowledge his own guilt. When the whites had been disposed of, attention turned to the free-coloreds, and now Dessalines decreed: 'Every free-colored is to be removed from Haiti,' and because it was known that Vaval despised the free-coloreds and had frequently engaged them in battle, he was given the job of hunting them down in the north.

Mortally ashamed of his behavior in those frenzied days, Vaval recalled his siege of Meduc. Under the leaders.h.i.+p of the Premords, the coloreds of the region a.s.sembled at their plantation, where the fighting was brutal. Vaval could not subdue them, and one of his men asked scornfully: 'Vaval? If you handled Leclerc so easily, why not these few free-coloreds?' and he had no answer. They were heroic.

Now came a kindlier remembrance. At the end of the battles, when Vaval had to retreat without having dislodged them, Julie Premord came to him, and she suggested a nationwide truce to stop this senseless killing. She'd guarantee adherence of the free-coloreds if Vaval would speak for the blacks. But when he sent a horseman into Cap-Hatien with her suggestion, Dessalines replied: 'No truce. Exterminate them.' But that could not be done, because the Premords, the Toussaints of their race, were defending their plantation most ably. So Vaval had to withdraw, knowing that the last sensible opportunity had been lost.

Then his memory flashed to a village square lined with palm trees. Throughout the nation the free-coloreds were being hunted down and slain. In the north they congregated at last in Meduc-the town in which the free-coloreds had once met secretly for their riotous dances-a remnant so powerless they had to surrender. Because Vaval had grown to respect them, he pleaded with the government that these final few be allowed to live quietly in their corner of the north. And he was listened to. In fact, he was dispatched to arrange the terms of surrender and forgiveness.

So at Meduc on a clear, fine day Vaval a.s.sembled the free-coloreds who were surrendering and stood with Premord and his wife as the final details were arranged. 'The war is ended,' Premord cried in a clear, solid voice that commanded respect, and as Vaval turned to look at him he thought: What a handsome man! His color is so much more attractive than I used to think. Premord continued: 'We have a new nation and a new ruler. France is gone forever and with it domination by the whites. On this happy day we begin a lasting friends.h.i.+p between groups that have for too long been separated.' With that, he embraced Vaval, shouting to his followers: 'See how two old enemies start their new friends.h.i.+p!' and everyone cheered.

Then, from a cottage near the square where they were meeting, the self-proclaimed emperor came out, and he cried in a wild voice: 'Kill them all!' and his black troops rushed forth with bayonets and guns and murdered every one of the five hundred who had come to make peace. Premord and his wife, who were standing with Vaval, clutched at his arms, and Xavier cried in anguish: 'Vaval, what's happening?' Before Vaval could intercede, they were torn from him, speared with bayonets a dozen times and thrown into a ditch. Not one free-colored survived, and those few who had hidden in the rest of the north were hunted down like animals and exterminated.*

These memories proved too painful for Vaval. With a wild, gasping sound he clutched at his throat: My G.o.d! What a terrible burden we've placed on our land! In 1789 it contained half a million prosperous and well-behaved people; now, probably less than two hundred thousand, they say. Plus all the dead English and Spanish and Polish invaders. Can a land tolerate such brutal abuse? Does the blood spilled upon it not contaminate it? Is our new Haiti condemned to be a ghost that will never be real?

Looking again to the north, he could see the roof of the chteau at Cap-Hatien and the multiple ma.s.sacres its inhabitants had known: 1791, 1793, 1799, 1802 ... no land could absorb such devastation; the scars would never be erased. He thought of the individuals responsible for this unending tragedy: grands blancs like Jerome Espivent, who hated both blacks and free-coloreds. And then he winced: Or blacks like me, who 'cleansed the land' of whites and coloreds alike. Well, now we have our black nation, totally black, and what are we going to make of it?

As the dark cloud of night spread over his tormented land, he wondered if it would ever lift.

* Dessalines' behavior became so murderously irrational that his two military cohorts, Petion and Christophe, decided that there was no other course but to murder him, which they did. Thus began that recurring cycle of dictators.h.i.+p, mismanagement and a.s.sa.s.sination that would plague Haiti henceforth.

THE DECADES following the slave rebellion in Haiti saw vast improvements in the fortunes of blacks throughout the Caribbean. Great Britain abolished slavery everywhere in its empire in 1834; France in 1848. The United States engineered a cynical trick in 1863; President Lincoln abolished salvery in the middle of the Civil War, but only in the southern states, over which he had no control. In those border states which he did control, it continued, but in 1865 it was honestly outlawed everywhere. Spanish holdings in the Caribbean retained a brutal slavery long after other areas had stopped, with Cuba continuing till an unbelievable 1886.

Blacks were technically freed, but it was sometimes difficult, when looking at a specific situation, to realize it. In Jamaica, for example, in 1865 a volatile black Baptist preacher, George Gordon, gave a sermon in which he cried: 'G.o.d wanted slavery ended, and it was,' but even as he spoke, an ominous throwback to the olden days was brewing.

'If G.o.d ever comes back to check on things,' the young man whispered, 'I'm sure he'll look like Governor Eyre.' As owner of Trevelyan, the sugar plantation producing the dark rum so highly regarded in Europe, and member of the island's Executive Council, Jason Pembroke exemplified the best in Jamaica. At twenty-eight he had the slim, crisp appearance of a young man who intended to keep everything around him under control, a neatly trimmed black beard and a cautious approach to his job of providing the governor with studied advice.

The man to whom he whispered his opinion was also a member of the council but entirely different in both character and appearance. He was Pembroke's cousin, Oliver Croome, whose sugar estate was larger and more valuable. A hearty man in his forties, clean-shaven, ruddy-faced, somewhat overweight and given to explosive bursts of laughter, he saw his duties much differently than did Pembroke: 'The queen tells us what to do, and we do it.' It would be unthinkable for him to utter even one word counter to directives originating from the Colonial Office in London: 'And if our b.u.g.g.e.rs think they can ignore the queen's rules, there's always the marines to whip 'em into shape.'

They were good friends, these dissimilar cousins-Pembroke austere and cautious, Croome flamboyant and given to wild statements-and although they usually differed in politics, with Pembroke a quiet, thoughtful liberal, Croome a loud-spoken archconservative, they did heartily agree on certain att.i.tudes common to their cla.s.s: loyalty to the crown, love for England, in which their families had spent more time than in Jamaica; and a fierce determination to protect the welfare of sugar planters. To accomplish these desirable ends, they gave their support to Eyre, a heroic type of man who did indeed look like some all-wise, paternal Jove or Jupiter come down from heaven to straighten out the affairs of Jamaica.

'He's a man who knows what he's doing,' Oliver whispered to his cousin, and the two nodded deferentially to the austere man seated at the head of their council table. Edward John Eyre, now fifty years old, was a towering figure, heavily bearded and with a mustache so thick that it obscured his mouth, making his halting speech rumble. Once when listening to him orate, Jason Pembroke had said: 'When G.o.d spoke through the burning bush, He must have sounded a lot like that.'

Eyre was not a traditional colonial governor, no effete son of some notable English family who had gained his position because n.o.ble relatives had done his bargaining for him. Third son of an impoverished Church of England clergyman whose ancestors had once been well-to-do church leaders, he found himself at seventeen with a good education but no prospects. In this extremity his prudent father did two things to aid him: he collected from friends enough money to purchase the boy a commission in the army, but just as Edward was about to become a soldier, his father suggested: 'Why don't you keep the money and try your fortunes in Australia?'

The idea was bold, unexpected, and in October 1832, Edward John Eyre bought pa.s.sage to the unknown continent, where he arrived in late March of the next year, a tedious voyage of more than a hundred and forty days. In Sydney, like any thoughtful Englishman of the period, he went from house to house, office to office, presenting the numerous letters of introduction which family friends had provided, but nothing came of these solicitations, and he was left on his own with no friends and only the vast, empty continent at hand to provide a home and an occupation.

By virtue of an iron will and a well-disciplined physique, he began heroic explorations into the loneliest parts of Australia, traveling thousands of miles, often attended by only one companion-the smiling, indefatigable aborigine boy Wylie. Together they penetrated the continent in a manner that later experts would say was impossible, and in the end Eyre was recognized as one of the bravest of all Australian explorers and was honored by having the continent's largest lake named after him. His personal courage was unequaled, his perceptions far more acute than those common at the time, and his love for that land unmatched. Had he chosen to spend his life in Australia, he would have died a revered national hero.

But, hungering after fame, the pomp of office and the prerogatives of command, he quit Australia to join Great Britain's colonial service, determined to win rapid promotion to the governors.h.i.+p of some remote colony which he could rule as emperor. His grand design ran into immediate trouble, for when he was posted to New Zealand in a minor position, he accomplished nothing. He had somewhat better luck on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, and an almost soporific tour of duty on Antigua, after which, in 1862 at the age of forty-seven, he was posted to the important island of Jamaica as lieutenant governor, a job he discharged with enthusiasm and ability, especially when a great fire threatened the island's princ.i.p.al town, Kingston. Reported a paper at the time: Governor Eyre sped by horse from his residence in Spanish Town, galloping directly into the heart of our city and fearlessly throwing all his energies into fighting the fire that was creating such havoc. Never before have we seen a queen's representative behave so gallantly in the face of very real danger. All praise to Governor Eyre, a man's man.

There were, however, rumbles of discontent among the landed gentry of the island: 'How dare they send us a governor with no decent family background when we've been accustomed to members of the aristocracy?' Others said: 'His only qualification for this high office, once held by men of the highest type, often n.o.bility, is that he once ran sheep in the G.o.dforsaken barrens of Australia. He's not good enough for this island.' One of the more serious charges brought against him was that 'he has been seen on several occasions riding not in his private carriage but in a public conveyance. Disgraceful! How lacking in dignity or respect for his position!' When a report of this impropriety reached London, Eyre's immediate superior scribbled on the paper: 'As to the charge of going in a public vehicle, I have known even a secretary of state guilty of such indecorum,' to which the head of the office, the Duke of Newcastle, replied with his own endors.e.m.e.nt: 'I've done the same.'

At the beginning of 1865, that critical year in which so many events would agitate Jamaica, Governor Eyre was so firmly ensconced that his ardent supporters like Pembroke and Croome had reason to suppose that he would remain in office permanently, although Jason had begun to suspect the man's ability to hold the island's various elements together in harmony. As he watched Eyre stalk out of the chamber in imperial grandeur, he said, tugging reflectively on his beard: 'I begin to detect signs of great arrogance in our governor.'