Zarite

This is how I remember it. Outside, crickets and the hooting of an owl, inside, the moon illuminating with precise stripes the sleeping body. So young! Watch over him for me, Erzulie, loa of deepest waters, I would ask, rubbing my doll, the one my grandfather Honore gave me and that was still my companion. Come, Erzulie, mother, beloved, with your necklaces of pure gold, your cape of toucan feathers, your crown of flowers, and your three rings, one for each husband. Help us, loa of dreams and hopes. Protect him from Cambray, make him invisible to the master's eyes, make him cautious before others but proud in my arms, quiet his African heart in the light of day so that he may survive, and instill courage in him by night so that he not lose his wish for freedom. Look upon us with benevolence, Erzulie, loa of jealousy. Do not envy us, because this happiness is as fragile as the wings of a fly. He will go. If he does not, he will die, you know that, but do not take him from me quite yet, let me stroke the slim boy's back before it becomes a man's.

He was a warrior, this love of mine, like the name his father gave him: Gambo, which means warrior. I whispered his forbidden name when we were alone. Gambo…and that word resonated through my veins. It cost him many beatings to answer to the name they gave him here, and to hide his true name. Gambo, he said to me, touching his chest the first time we made love. Gambo, Gambo, he repeated until I dared say it to him. Then he spoke to me in his language, and I answered in mine. It took a while for him to learn Creole and to teach me something of his tongue, the one my mother was not able to give me, but from the beginning we did not need to talk. Love has mute words, more transparent than the river. Then Gambo had just arrived, he looked like a child, he was nothing but bones, frightened. Other larger and stronger captives had been left floating in the bitter sea, looking for the current that flowed toward Guinea. How did he endure the crossing? He came with his flesh raw from lashings, Cambray's method for breaking in new slaves, the same he used with dogs and horses. On his chest, over his heart, was a red burn bearing the initials of the slave trade company put on him in Africa before embarking and still had not healed. Tante Rose told me to wash the wounds with water, a lot of water, and to cover them with poultices of a Moorish herb, aloe, and lard. They had to close from inside out. On the burn, no water, only fat. No one knew how to cure like she did, even Dr. Parmentier wanted to know her secrets and she gave them to him, though they were used to help other whites, because knowledge comes from Papa Bondye and it belongs to everyone, and if not shared it is lost. And that is so. Those days she was occupied with the slaves who arrived sick, so it fell to me to treat Gambo.

The first time I saw him he was lying facedown in the slave hospital, covered with flies. With difficulty I helped him sit up and gave him a sip of taffia and a small spoonful of the maitresse's drops I had stolen from her blue vial. Then I began the unpleasant task of cleaning him up. The wounds were not too badly inflamed, for Cambray had not been able to douse them with salt and vinegar, but the pain must have been terrible. Gambo bit his lips, not complaining. After he was clean, I sat down beside him to sing to him, since I didn't know any words of consolation in his language. I wanted to explain to him how to behave in order not to provoke the hand that held the whip, how he should work and obey while his vengeance was growing, that fire that smolders inside. My godmother convinced Cambray that the boy had the plague and that it was best to leave him alone so he wouldn't give it to the rest of the crew. The overseer gave her permission to take him to her cabin because he never lost hope that Tante Rose would contract some fatal fever; she was immune, however, she had a deal with Legba, the loa of sorcery. In the meantime I began to put in my maitre's head the idea of assigning Gambo to the kitchen. He would never last in the cane fields because the overseer had had his eye on him from the beginning. Tante Rose left us alone in her cabin during treatments. She guessed. And the fourth day it happened. Gambo was so foggy from pain, and from everything he'd lost-his land, his family, his freedom-that I wanted to put my arms around him as his mother would have done. Affection is good for healing. One touching led to another, and I found myself sliding down, not touching his shoulders, so he could rest his head on my breast. His body was burning, he still had a lot of fever, I don't think he knew what we were doing. I didn't know love. What the master did with me was dark and shameful, that is what I told Gambo, but he didn't believe me. With my maitre, my soul, my ti-bon-ange, let go and went flying elsewhere and only my corps-cadavre lay in that bed. Gambo. His light body on mine, his hands at my waist, his breath on my lips, his eyes looking at me from the other side of the sea, from Guinea, that was love. Erzulie, loa of love, save him from all things bad, protect him. That was my supplication.

Turbulent Times

More than thirty years had gone by since Macandal, that legendary sorcerer, planted the seed of insurrection, and since then his spirit had traveled with the wind from one end of the island to the other, infiltrating slave quarters, cabins, ajoupas, mills, and tempting slaves with the promise of freedom. He adopted the form of a serpent, a beetle, a monkey, a macaw, he blended with the whisper of the rain, he clamored with the thunder, he incited rebellion with the howl of the storm. Whites sensed him too. Every slave was an enemy, and there were already more than half a million of them, two-thirds of whom came directly from Africa bearing their enormous load of resentment and living only to burst their chains and reap revenge. Thousands of slaves arrived in Saint-Domingue, but never enough to fill the insatiable demands of the planters. Whip, hunger, work. Neither vigilance nor the most brutal repression kept many from escaping; some managed to do that in the port, as soon as they were unloaded and their chains removed to be baptized. They ran off naked and sick, with one thought: get away from the whites. They crossed plains, crawling through pasturelands, they plunged into jungle and climbed the mountains of that unfamiliar territory. If they succeeded in joining a band of Maroons, they were saved from slavery. War, freedom. The bozales, born free in Africa and ready to die to be free once again, infected those born on the island with courage, the ones who had never known freedom and who knew Guinea as a hazy kingdom at the bottom of the sea. The planters lived armed, waiting. The Regiment Le Cap had been reinforced with four thousand French soldiers who barely touched terra firma before they dropped, struck by cholera, malaria, and dysentery. The slaves believed that mosquitoes, the cause of that death toll, were Macandal's armies battling against the whites. Macandal had freed himself from the fire of the stake and metamorphosed into a mosquito. Macandal had returned, as he promised. In Saint-Lazare fewer slaves had fled than in other places, and Valmorain attributed it to the fact that he did not vent his cruelty on his Negroes, none of that coating them with molasses and exposing them to red ants, as Lacroix did. In his strange nightly monologues he would comment to Tete that no one could accuse him of cruelty, but if the situation continued to grow worse he would have to give Cambray carte blanche. She was careful not to mention the word insurgency in his presence. Tante Rose had assured her that a general uprising of slaves was only a question of time, and that Saint-Lazare, like all the other plantations on the island, was going to disappear in flames.