The Stone that the Builder Refused Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Praise

  Fort de Joux, France - October 1802

  PREFACE

  Part One - DEBAKMEN

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Fort de Joux, France - October 1802

  Part Two - RAVINE À COULEUVRE

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Fort de Joux, France - November 1802

  Part Three - LA CRÊTE À PIERROT

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Fort de Joux, France - March 1803

  Part Four - THE ROOTS OF THE TREE

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Dessounen: Fort de Joux, France - April 1803

  Weté Mò anba Dlo Haiti - April 1825

  GLOSSARY

  CHRONOLOGY OF HISTORICAL EVENTS

  ORIGINAL LETTERS AND DOCUMENTS

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Madison Smartt Bell

  Copyright Page

  Thanks to David Baker for patient, painstaking, and skillful work on these long and sometimes trilingual manuscripts.

  Without Dan Frank, Jane Gelfman, Altie Karper, Suzanne Williams, and Sonny Mehta, I’d never have rolled this stone to the top of the hill.

  To those who’ve helped me on my ways in and out of Haiti—Rolph Trouillot, Jean de la Fontaine, Gesner Pierre, Faubert Pierre, Lóló Beaubrun, Manzè Beaubrun, Guidel Présumé, Alex Roshuk, Handy Laporte, Robert Stone, Lyonel Trouillot, Michelle Karshan, Patrick Delatour, Eddy Lubin, Rachel Beauvoir, Nicolas Bussenius, Uriode Orelien, Abraham Joanis, Evelyne Trouillot, Rodney Saint Eloi, Georges Castera, Père Max Dominique, Père William Smarth, Marie-Claudette Edoissaint, Laetitia Schutt, Gerard Barthelmy, Richard Morse, Anne-Carinne Trouillot, Max Beauvoir, Bob Shacochis, Myrieme Millot-Colas, Ephèle Milcé, Tequila Minsky, Bob Corbett ak tout moun nan Corbettland, tout moun nan Morne Calvaire, tout moun nan Lakou Jisou—m’ap di gran mèsi.

  To the spirit of Père Antoine Adrien, who put every day of his life on the line for Haiti’s history and Haiti’s future, benediksyon pou moun k’ap goumen pou la jistis.

  The stone that the builder refused will always be the head cornerstone.

  —Bob Marley

  Praise for Madison Smartt Bell’s

  The Stone That The Builder Refused

  “Extraordinary. . . . Exhilarating. . . . Bell’s supple, exact prose . . . [has] hallucinatory force. . . . Almost every moment is full, like some great narrative painting, alive with the detail that puts you on the road or in the house where some murder or meeting is about to take place. . . . These books do what novels are meant to do: they propose their own vivid and inexorable history.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A towering work. . . . Bell has emerged as one of the most brilliant, artistic and daring historical novelists of our time, creating a vividly imagined, nearly week-by-week fictionalization of the bloody birth of a nation, synthesizing and transforming an enormous amount of research into tales that are extraordinarily empathetic and rich in emotions that range from hatred, fury, terror and bloodlust to humor, joy, ecstasy and love. He has brought messianic Toussaint L’Ouverture—a courageous warrior, master strategist and heroic champion of human rights—to vital and poignant life as no one has ever done before. . . . In sum, Bell has created that rarest of works, a masterpiece.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Bell uses fiction to take us where history books cannot go—into the thoughts and fears of the revolutionaries and plantation owners and those in between who got caught up in the riots and bloodshed. . . . These three novels succeed in redefining American cultural history in powerful and profound ways.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Epic. . . . Heartbreaking. . . . Absorbing. . . . Strikingly rich detail. . . . Riveting and immensely satisfying. . . . A masterly piece of work.”

  —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  “Astonishing. . . . Bell’s immersion in the world he creates [is] so complete that . . . [it] has an osmotic effect. . . . It’s hard to imagine that anyone could have chronicled Haiti and the travails of Toussaint with an eye more unblinking or with a hand so steady.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Breathtaking. . . . Bell has crafted such a profound page-turner, full of action and high drama. . . . A spectacular achievement.”

  —The Miami Herald

  “Remarkable. . . . Bell is a gifted craftsman. . . . He’s the sort of writer one can always turn to on faith; he seems incapable of writing an inelegant phrase. He captures the flavor of the island with depth and obvious love, including enough French and Creole for linguistic flavor, and interweaving English translations for clarity. The balance is close to perfect.”

  — The Seattle Times

  “Dazzling. . . . With assiduousness that does not flag even through the most detailed of battle scenes, Bell has taken this shadowy historical figure and revealed what is essential, heroic and lasting in his legacy. . . . A masterpiece.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Powerful. . . . Bell manages both to render a readable narrative . . . and to use language with skill and beauty. . . . It’s hard to say anyone is writing better.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “[Bell] has proved himself to be a master of historical fiction. . . . There is no question that this trilogy will make an indelible mark on literary history—one worthy of occupying the same shelf as Tolstoy’s War and Peace. . . . No matter what readers take away from it . . . Bell has triumphed.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “Breathtakingly successful on so many levels. . . . One wonders how the events of today will be drawn in two hundred years, if a writer should exist of Mr. Bell’s masterful abilities.”

  —New York Post

  “Riveting. . . . Bell’s formidable achievement not only makes impressive literature, but he has managed to turn military, political and colonial history into such delicious reading that I found myself still going at 4 AM, unwilling to put sleep before pleasure.”

  —Annie Dawid, The Oregonian

  “Triumphant. . . . By turns powerful and appalling. . . . Bell does a superb job with an incredible mass of material, but he never lets the material overwhelm the story. . . . [He] has created an amazing work of historical fiction.”

  —The Tennessean

  Moyse Dézo

  Prann sa pou prinsip-O

  M’ap poté dlo par kiyè pou plen kanari mwen

  FOR ALL WHO WALK WITH THE SPIRIT OF TOUSSAINT

  LOUVERTURE IN THE FIGHT FOR HAITI’S FREEDOM,

  THEN AND NOW

  Fort de Joux, France

  October 1802

/>   Toussaint sat hunched forward, consumed by his shadow, which the firelight threw huge and dark and shuddering behind him on the glistening wall. He was cold, mortally cold, with his ague. Drawing closer about his shoulders the ratty wool blanket he’d taken from his cot, he thought of adding to the fire one of the three or four chunks of wood that remained in the cell. But his trembling would not permit this action. His teeth chattered with the vibration of his chill, so that the bad teeth in his injured jawbone shot a bolt of pain to the very top of his skull. The white flash seared away everything. He gripped the blanket closer to his throat and dug the fingertips of his free hand around the swelling of his jaw, containing the pain, compressing it.

  His trembling stopped. So, apparently, did the cold. He felt a moment of equilibrium. The blanket slipped down on his shoulders. Experimentally he spread both arms. The shadow loomed, and startled him; he tilted slightly in his chair.

  Baron de la Croix. Lord of the Cemetery . . . In a voice not his own he seemed to hear the whispered phrase If it’s not your time, Ghede won’t take you.

  He gathered his feet beneath him, feeling capable now of a balanced movement, but before he could rise, the fever swelled into the space the chill had vacated. The blanket slithered down around his waist. He heard his voice, harsh and distant: Tuez les responsables! A log broke in the fireplace, gnawed to a spindle by the small blue flames, and red coals scattered on the hearth. Kill everyone responsible! His order had not been respected. He had lost the strength that would have carried him far enough to add a piece of wood to the fire. In any case the fever warmed him now. Sweat poured from his every crevice, pooling in the hollow of his throat. His firewood would not be resupplied till morning. He seemed to see the damp and anxious face of Baille, commandant of the Fort de Joux and Toussaint’s jailer, muttering uneasy complaints about his use of firewood, sugar . . . The face dissolved into the fever and the long-winged shadow hovering on the seeping wall.

  It was late morning when he woke, as he knew by the color of the light leaking in through the half-inch mesh of the grating; high under the vault at one end of the cell, it supplied his only traces of the light of day. The usual draught sucked through the space, flirting from the grating to the narrow crack beneath the door. He had slept considerably later than was his custom. While he was unconscious, they had come to bring more firewood and replenish his small store of food and water.

  He got up slowly, bare toes freezing against the flagstones. The cold contact shocked him into brighter consciousness; he welcomed it for that. His joints ached, but for the moment he felt neither chill nor fever. That was well, though he knew that as the day wore on his symptoms might renew themselves.

  He knelt on the hearth stones, uncovered the fading coals from the ash, and breathed on them till their life returned, then fed them with splinters till stronger flames began to rise. In one of his small, sporadic kindnesses, Baille had furnished a bag of cornmeal, knowing that Toussaint preferred this to oats. Boiling water in a small iron kettle, he made an adequate serving of mush. Maïs moulin...1 there were no beans, and no hot peppers. Scarcely sugar or salt enough to give it any flavor at all. He ate dutifully, for the sake of his strength, his lucidity, and cleaned the bowl with a scrap of ship’s biscuit, which was itself too hard for his shattered teeth to break. He held it in his mouth a long time while he thought.

  A bell tolled in some distant tower of the Fort de Joux, and as if in answer a current of cold air swam through the cell. The beads of water on the inner wall, raw stone of the mountain, had taken on a pearly luminescence. It was months since Toussaint had left his cell, but the wind and the cold without had struck him when he’d first been brought here, though that was a milder season. Here in the Jura Mountains the peaks were snow-capped all summer long, and the wind cut and whistled like a whip.

  He had marked the stones to count the days of his confinement; his mental calendar was clear. Twelve days since Bonaparte’s agent, Caffarelli, had departed, bearing Toussaint’s own memorandum to the First Consul. For the past four days, Toussaint had felt his anticipation of response spreading like an itch on saddle-chafed skin. As a general in the French army, he merited a reply from his ultimate superior. He was due his trial, his day in court; in justice he must pass before a tribunal. In the memorandum he had sent, the case was thoroughly presented. Blame for the war still rumbling in Saint Domingue, while Toussaint sat in this freezing cell, was shifted to Napoleon’s brother-in-law, the Captain-General Leclerc, whom Bonaparte had sent to attack him without cause. Yes, without the least legitimate reason, when Toussaint Louverture had never faltered in his loyalty to France—and was recognized too, as Governor-General of the colony. If Leclerc had presented himself in a friendly fashion, instead of forcing his entry everywhere with cannon and sword, much bloodshed would certainly have been avoided.

  At last the hardtack gave way and crumbled on his tongue. He swallowed, took a sip of water. The fire returned a faint warmth to the arches of his outstretched bare feet. With his thumb, he checked the corners of the three letters sewn into the lining of his coat. He’d asked Baille for a needle and thread to refasten some loose buttons. The jailer had consented, more than a little nervously, insisting on the return of the needle as if it might be used for a weapon or an instrument of escape. Here Toussaint had managed a small moral victory, transforming Baille’s anxiety into humiliation and shame. Baille was not well fitted to the role assigned him; he had no natural strain of cruelty. An invisible chain bound him together with Toussaint, like two slaves in a coffle.

  And still, Toussaint considered, more shame was due the men who had betrayed him . . . of the three letters snug in his coat lining, one, from Chief of Battalion Pesquidoux, was of small consequence. He had simply happened to receive it the same day as the other two . . . that last day.

  The first from Leclerc—and this, after all difficulty had been smoothed between them. Toussaint had at last acknowledged the authority of the Captain-General, had formally retired both from the Governor-Generalship and the French army, and withdrawn with his family to his plantations surrounding Ennery. And yet the oily words of Leclerc still pursued him there: Since you persist in thinking that the large number of troops now found at Plaisance are frightening the cultivators there, I have charged General Brunet to arrange the placement of a part of those troops with you...2

  This letter enclosed in another from Brunet:

  Here is the moment, Citizen General, to make it known in an indisputable manner to the General in Chief that those who may have been able to deceive him on the subject of your good faith are nothing but miserable slanderers, and that your own sentiments have no tendency but to restore order and tranquillity to the area where you live. It is essential that you support me in this matter. We have, my dear general, some arrangements to make together which cannot be dealt with by letter, but which a conference of one hour would complete. Were I not overcome by work and troublesome details, I’d be today the bearer of my own response, but as I am unable to leave these days, come to me yourself, and if you are recovered from your indisposition, let it be tomorrow. One must never delay when it is a question of doing good. You will not find, at my country plantation, all the amenities I would wish to organize for your reception, but you will find there the frankness of a gallant man who has no other wish but for the prosperity of the colony and your own personal happiness . . .

  La bonne foi, indeed. Toussaint sniffed and leaned sideways to spit through the gap in his front teeth onto the ashes in the hearth. Good faith . . . that Brunet and Leclerc should soil that phrase with their duplicitous tongues. Or Napoleon Bonaparte himself, for that matter. To whom Toussaint had appealed, most recently, for not only justice but mercy.

  He stretched his hands toward the fire, palms down, seeking what heat still rose from the fading embers. A glance at the woodpile, so meagerly replenished, let him know that he must not build it higher, since this small store must be eked out for all of the day and t
he evening. But more than the cold, it was the constant damp which troubled him. He released a wet cough from the ache in his chest, and glanced over his shoulder at the pearlescent, oozing wall. It seemed to him that his left hand grew slightly warmer than his right. With an effort of his will, he stopped both hands from trembling.

  His memorandum, that legal résumé of his self-justification and self-defense, had been penned to his dictation by a secretary procured by Baille. At the last minute, after the secretary had departed, Toussaint had added a final note in his own hand, his own uncertain orthography, before finally presenting the packet to Caffarelli for delivery:

  Premier Consul, Père de toutes les militre. De fanseur des innosant,juige integre, prononcé dont sure un homme quie plus malheure que couppable. Gairice mes plai, illé tre profonde, vous seul pourretpoeter les remede, saluter et lan pé ché de ne jamai ouver, vous sete medecien, ma position et mes service mérite toute votre a tantion et je conte an tierment sur votre justice et votre balance. Salut et respec.3

  Toussaint Louverture

  As he ran over those words in his mind, it seemed to him that his wounds must all reopen. To dwell upon thoughts such as these was to call the spirit of Ezili Jé Rouge, enraged with the bitterness of her losses and the terrible betrayals she had suffered. With her nails and her teeth she would tear at her clothing and the ground where she crouched, lay open her own cheeks in bloody furrows, and otherwise rend the flesh of the postulants she possessed.

  But Toussaint never walked with Ezili Jé Rouge. Ezili Fréda he had sometimes known, the sponsor of love, who bore the great wound in her heart with patience and devotion. If he trusted Caffarelli in little else, Toussaint did trust him to deliver the letter he had written to Suzanne. Which by this time he must have done, so that even now it might be in her hands.

  Ma cher Epouse,

  Je profite l’occasions dunt bon général pour vous donné mé nouvel. J’ai été malade an narrivant ici, mais le commandant de cet place qui et un homme umain ma porté toute les cecours possible; grâce à Dieu, sa va beaucoup mieu; vous savé mon namitier pour ma famille et mon nattachement pour une femme que je chéris, pour quoi mavé vous pas donné de vos nouvel.