A Passage to Guinée
Eloi Fabre woke to a knock on his door.
He closed his eyes, thinking it a dream, but the knocking started again and grew more insistent. Mireille, beside him, was awake too, and was telling him urgently to go to the door. He rose, in his nightshirt, and crossed the room.
"Who is it?" he demanded.
"Doctor Fabre, you must come," was the answer. The voice spoke French, not Creole, and its accent was hard to understand. "You must attend the king."
He opened the door a crack and saw two men in uniform with the look of Africa about them: members of King Henri's Dahomey Guard. He'd heard the king was ill, and he knew that the warriors from Dahomey brooked no disobedience: with others he might argue, but with these men he must go.
"Give me a minute to dress," he said, and hastily put on breeches and coat. Mireille's eyes were wide with fear, and he kissed her forehead, trying to reassure her in the time he didn't have. The guardsmen knocked again - their patience only lasted so long - and this time, Eloi went.
There was a coach waiting. They proceeded quickly past the long two-story houses: at this hour, there were few people on the streets; few, even, watching from the balconies. They had turned around now, no longer facing the mountain, and could be headed for only one place.
The palace was as Eloi remembered: a modest affair by European standards, but still the largest house in Cap-Haïtien. Its elegance was marred only slightly by the scars that the French cannonballs had left four years before, when their gunships bombarded the city. The king hadn't been there - he was commanding the shore batteries - but he forbade any repair, ordering the gashes in the wall to stand as a memorial.
He was a strong king, was Henri-Christophe. Some of his deeds had been evil - as what king's were not? - but he was strong, and the people liked having a strong man to lead them. Even Eloi did. He knew, better than most, what was in the world beyond.
A doorway, bowing servants in livery, and the great hall. There was a ball still in progress: there had been more of them lately, as the lavish Prince Jacques-Victor emerged from the shadow of the austere king. The guests were arrayed in a bewildering variety of clothing: some in French court finery from the last century, others in the latest English fashion, still others in the style that had been current five years before when Eloi was in medical school. The dances, too, mixed past and present: here a quadrille, there a minuet.
There were a few Europeans in attendance, and Eloi wondered what they thought of the party: he'd been in Europe long enough that it seemed vaguely comic to him, and he could only imagine how it appeared to them. Did they see that there was heroism in this ball, as well as comedy? The barons and counts, many of them, were veterans of the revolution, with the marks of age added to the stigmata of slavery, and they looked to a foreigner like slaves dressed in their masters' clothes, but that very fact was what made them heroes. Eloi knew full well what Henri Christophe had done, but making himself king in the slavers' despite and turning other slaves into noblemen - there was a magic in that, a magic that a Frenchman who looked upon this as a grotesque parody of a placée ball wouldn't see.
And had Eloi himself not, in a small way, also been ennobled? His mother had been a servant in this very palace, and that was where the baron de Vastey, the crown prince's tutor and Haiti's greatest man of letters [1], had noticed him. The baron had sent him to school, paid for him to study medicine in London and Paris; it was at one of the baron's parties, a month after his return, that Eloi had met Mireille. If he’d been born before the revolution – or even in Port-au-Prince, where an overseas education was in all but a few cases the prerogative of the
gens de couleur – what chance would he have had of that?
His attention, finally, was drawn to the man he had come to attend. The king was at a table, presiding over the ball with a glass of wine in his hand, engaged in jovial conversation with a couple of his dukes and a visiting British merchant. He looked shockingly drawn: Eloi had last seen him at a public appearance two months before, and he’d aged ten years since then.
He shouldn’t be up this late, Eloi thought.
He shouldn’t be up at all. And then he realized: Henri still was a strong king and would be seen to be one, even if he had to spend the last of his strength to do it.
One of the African guardsmen went forward to whisper something urgent into the ear of a royal equerry, and a few minutes later, Eloi saw the king rise. “This ball is ended,” Henri said in a surprisingly firm voice. “I thank you all for the pleasure of your company this night, and I bid you a safe journey home.” A few of the guests – those who didn’t understand the king’s textbook French – appeared confused, but they joined the general parade of farewells.
The guardsman was by Eloi’s side again. “The king will send for you when he’s in his room.”
He nodded, returning the greeting of a baroness on the way to her coach. The equerry arrived sooner than he’d thought possible, and led him and the soldiers up a broad staircase to an oaken door.
A voice answered the servant’s knock. “Toussaint? Dessalines? You may bring him in.”
Eloi realized with a start that the African guardsmen did bear a slight resemblance to the two heroes of the revolution. And why should Henri not have given them those names? To the peasants, Guinée was the spirit-world, the lost homeland where their souls traveled after death; if such great heroes returned from there to serve Henri, then the king must have very powerful sorcery indeed.
A strong man must be seen as strong.
He should have named one Pétion, the doctor thought, but no warrior from Dahomey could look even slightly like the southern republic's late president.
The room beyond the door was dimly lit, but the king looked even worse in his bedclothes than he had at the dance. Prince Jacques-Victor was by his side: Eloi had heard the rumors about the crown prince counting the days until his father’s death, but here in this room, no one could mistake his grief for anything but the genuine article.
The doctor bowed deeply. “Your Majesty,” he said. “You should not be attending balls. You must rest, if you want to live.”
The king’s harsh laugh answered him. “What I wish matters not. I’m a dead man, and my body will soon realize what my mind already knows. Last night I dreamed of Guinée, and tonight I go there in truth.”
“In that case, your Majesty,” Eloi dared, “why did you send for me?”
Henri said nothing for a moment, only wheezing, and Eloi realized that this, too, was laughter. “So that you would be seen coming in. So that all my guests will say that Haiti’s finest doctor has come to attend me. And so that, when you walk the halls of this palace for the next three days, no one will realize that I’m dead, and my guardsmen can make sure that no one stands in my son’s way.”
Eloi felt a bone-deep chill. He knew as well as anyone which nobles and generals had ambitions to take Jacques-Victor’s place, and some of them would no doubt join the king’s honor guard in Guinée. And he, who knew the secret…
“Don’t fear for yourself,” Henri said. “Once Toussaint and Dessalines have finished their work, there will be no more need for secrecy. You will go home to your Mireille in three days, and you will be rewarded handsomely… if you tell no one. Not even my closest servants.”
“Yes, your Majesty. Not even them.”
“You may sit,” the king said. “I won’t be needing your services, so you might as well make yourself comfortable. And I want to speak to my son.”
The crown prince leaned low over his father’s bed, taking in the king’s words. Eloi, by accident rather than design, was close enough that he too could hear, and with a start, he realized that Henri was telling a story, and that he was speaking the English of his childhood on Grenada. Of all the people in the room, only he and the crown prince could understand.
“… the King of Babylonia died without an heir,” Henri was saying, “and the priests consulted their oracles to learn who to crown in his place. All their magic told them the same thing: to elevate a slave in the palace counting-house. Much as they refused to believe, their gods kept telling them, and finally they went to the slave and gave him the crown. But before they brought him to the throne, they made him promise that he would never forget he was king.
“The slave ruled wisely and well, but one thing vexed the priests: that he had a secret room that no one could enter. One day they picked the lock to that room, and found within it a pair of manacles, a whip and the rags of a slave. And who should come in at that moment but the slave turned king.
“‘What is this?’ the priests asked him. ‘You promised us you would never forget you were king.’
“‘And I haven’t,’ he said. ‘But I also promised God I would never forget I was once a slave.’”
The story had exhausted him and he closed his eyes, taking shallow breaths, his strength finally spent. There was silence, broken only by Jacques-Victor’s tears, and then the breathing ceased.
“We must find a priest,” Eloi said.
“After three days,” the prince answered. “Only then.”
Eloi nodded, ashamed of having forgotten. “We should pray for him, then.”
“My father knew that slaves’ prayers aren’t answered, but if you wish.”
The doctor breathed deeply, and started to say the Creole prayer for the dead, but realized he had forgotten the words.
_______
[1] The
baron de Vastey was executed in 1820 when Henri-Christophe was overthrown, but was only 39 at the time and, had the monarchy survived, could have lived much longer.
And I think it's better if discussions are here in the same thread with stories.
