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.
Prosper Cambray had commented on that improbable rumor with his employer. Ever since he was able to remember the talk had been the same, and never came to anything. What could miserable slaves do against the militia and men like him, resolute in all things? How would they organize and arm themselves? Who was going to lead them? Impossible. He spent the day on horseback and slept with two pistols within reach of his hand, one eye open, always on guard. The whip was an extension of his fist, the language most known and feared by all; nothing pleased him as much as the fear he inspired. Only his employer's scruples had kept him from using more imaginative methods of repression, but that was about to change, the bursts of insurrection had multiplied. The opportunity had come for him to demonstrate that he could manage the plantation under the worst conditions. He had been waiting too many years to be given the position of manager. He couldn't complain, because in the meantime he'd amassed a not inconsequential amount of money through bribes, petty thievery, and smuggling. Valmorain never suspected how much disappeared from his storage rooms. Cambray boasted of being a bull with the slave girls; none escaped serving him in his hammock and no one interfered. As long as he did not molest Tete he could fornicate at will, but because she was out of his reach she was the only one who fired him with lust and rage. He watched her from a distance, spied on her from nearby, trapped her at some careless moment, but she always wriggled away. "Be careful, Monsieur Cambray. If you touch me, I will tell the master," Tete would warn him, trying to control the tremble in her voice. "You be careful, whore, because when I get my hands on you, you are going to pay. Who do you think you are, wretch? You are already twenty; soon now your master is going to replace you with another, younger girl and then it will be my turn. I am going to buy you. Your master will be happy to sell you," he threatened, playing with his braided leather whip.
Meanwhile, the French Revolution had hit the colony like the slash of a dragon's tail, shaking it to its foundation. The grands blancs, conservatives and monarchists, looked upon the changes with horror, but the petits blancs supported the republic, which had done away with differences among classes: liberte, egalite, fraternite for whites. As for the affranchis, they had sent delegations to Paris to negotiate their right to citizenship before the Assemblee Nationale, because in Saint-Domingue no white, rich or poor, was disposed to give that to them. Valmorain indefinitely postponed his return to France because he realized that there was now nothing that tied him to his country. Once he had raged about the monarchy's profligate ways, and now he complained about the disarray of the republic. After so many years of not fitting into the colony, he had ended by accepting that his place was in the New World. Sancho Garcia del Solar wrote him with his usual candor to propose that he forget about Europe in general and France in particular; there was no place there for enterprising men, the future lay in Louisiana. He had good connections in New Orleans, and all he lacked was capital to launch a project several people were already interested in; he wanted, however, to give preference to Valmorain because of family ties and because when they both put their fingers on something gold burst from it. He explained to Valmorain that in its beginnings Louisiana had been a French colony and for some twenty years had belonged to Spain, but the population was obstinately loyal to its origins. The government was Spanish, but the culture and language continued to be French. The climate was similar to that in the Antilles, and the crops were the same, with the advantage that there was much more space and land was cheap; they could acquire a large plantation and exploit it without political problems or rebelling slaves. They would make a fortune in only a few years, he promised.
After losing her first child, Tete had wanted to be as sterile as the mules in the mill. For her to love and suffer as a mother, Maurice was enough, that delicate child capable of weeping with emotion over music or wetting himself in anguish when he witnessed cruelty. He was afraid of Cambray; he had only to hear the click of his boot heels in the gallery to run and hide. Tete relied on Tante Rose's remedies to keep from getting pregnant again, as other slaves did, but they were not always effective. The healer said that some children insisted on coming into the world because they could not suspect what was waiting for them. That was how it was with Tete's second pregnancy. The handfuls of fiber soaked in vinegar did nothing to prevent it, nor the infusions of pine needles, the burning mustard, or the rooster sacrificed to the loas to abort it. After the third moon without menstruating, she went to beg her godmother to end her problem with a sharp stick, but she refused; the risk of infection was enormous, and if they were caught attempting anything against the master's property, Cambray would have the perfect motive to flay them with his whip.