Free All Souls' Rising by Madison Smartt Bell Page A

dough.
    “The Colonial Assembly will accomplish nothing,” Maltrot said. “More wrangling about the May fifteenth decree, and they may stir up the mob to some foolishness into the bargain. Meanwhile Port-au-Prince is just as bad as Paris. Worse, it’s a state of open war. And it could easily happen at Le Cap, you know it could—the Colonial Assembly will furnish a handsome occasion.”
    “The May fifteenth decree is completely intolerable,” Arnaud said.
    “So you say.” Maltrot touched the rim of the fruit plate, rotated it with a whisper over the woven cane table the mulattress had brought out to support it. “I would suggest you choose your evils carefully. After all, the decree applies only to four hundred people, even Blanchelande admits that much. Four hundred colored men whose parents were born in freedom and can prove it, and out of how many thousands? Let them have their political rights, they couldn’t throw a shadow on our governance. The decree is a token and that is all.”
    “It is a token,” Arnaud said. “But that’s not all.”
    “He’s right,” Bayon de Libertat said, and cleared his throat. “Thus far. It’s a matter of principle.”
    The two men looked at him, turning their heads in unison. Bayon de Libertat’s breath went heavily in the soggy heat; sweat ran from his temples and down the leathery creases in his neck. He reached for his handkerchief and dabbed his forehead and his sweat-stringy hair. Arnaud clapped his hands and called into the house. A sixteen-year-old Negress, stomach rounded by an early pregnancy, came out and began to haul on the rope that turned the fan over the gallery.
    “ Liberté ,” Arnaud said grindingly. “ Egalité. Fraternité . You’d have me claim brotherhood with the yellow niggers, would you?”
    “Oh no,” said the Sieur Maltrot. He lifted a slice of papaya an inch or so above the plate and held it while the juice dripped down, letting his wandering eye graze over the black girl’s rising belly. “Oh no, nothing so near as that.”
    “You’ll give them notions,” Arnaud said. “ Ideas .” He bit down on the word with the same contempt. “Let one yellow cur have the rights of a white man and they’ll all be howling for the same. I know you haven’t forgotten Ogé since you talked of him yourself.”
    “By no means.” The Sieur Maltrot snapped the fruit into his jaws and swallowed. He stretched his legs out comfortably again. “Ogé has done us all a great service,” he said. “I know you don’t believe it but he did. And remember, he was a Creole in name only, really just another troublemaker from Paris, no different from that white trash that plagues us on the coast. He came here and called for mulatto rights and armed his band and even tried to raise the blacks, and what came next? We crushed him .” Maltrot licked fruit juice from his fingers, smacked his palm down on his knee. “Easily as that. Ogé proved that it cannot be done .”
    “However interesting that may be,” Arnaud said, “you’ve a long way to go to convince me to claim kin with him, or any of the yellow rats.”
    “Don’t think of it as a love match,” said Maltrot. “It’s a marriage of convenience. Temporary. So long as our interests coincide, however long it takes to dispose of that mob of petit blancs at Port-au-Prince. Afterward,” he waved his sticky fingers airily, “everything will return to the way it was before.”
    “As easily as that?” said Arnaud.
    “Why not?” said Maltrot. “You’ve commanded mulattoes in the maréchaussée . They do their job excellently, do they not? And afterward they lay down their arms and go home peaceably? They haven’t terrorized the countryside.”
    “The point is well taken,” said Arnaud, “but—”
    “In any case,” Maltrot said, “it’s not our territory, nor yet our affair. Let Hanus de Jumecourt make his own arrangements. There’s a very small part that you might play, but afterward