First Chapter: "The Salt Roads"

I skinned up my face to think of him sticking that left hand he used to wipe his ass with into the cook pot. All the Ginen thought Makandal was so powerful, that he was our saviour. Me, I didn't trust him. I made to shove past him. "Get out my way and go!" Runaway. Thief. Hiding in the bush and making off with the yams the Ginen must grow to feed themselves and their children. Calling himself "maroon."

"I'm gone, matant Mer." And just like that, he disappeared. Turned to air? No. There he was, a manmzèl now, doing its dragonfly dance level with my nose. So like Makandal, playing games when I was about serious business. The manmzèl landed on my hand, its wings flicking like when you whip your back skirt hem to contempt somebody. It was missing half a front leg.

"Get away, or I feed you salt!" I told him. Fleur had told me that Makandal's mother back in Africa had been djinn; a demon from the North, the desert lands. Me, I thought I knew how he strengthened the djinn half of him. Every man jack of us as we got off the slave ships, the white god's priests used sea water to make the magic cross on our foreheads and bind us with salt to this land. Maybe not Makandal. Never chained with white man's obeah, never fed the salt of the bitter soil of this new world to tie his earthly body down to it, never ate the salt fish and the filthy haram, the salt pork that was the only meat the Ginen got. A miracle. But he was still too much of this world to be able to fly back home. No, he was going to stay here and make mischief instead. I went to clap the nasty fly dead like the vermin it was, but it scooted away, wings buzzing that tune: "Wine is white blood, San Domingo; we going to drink white blood, San Domingo. . ."

A black wave of retribution was set to crash over Saint Domingue, and its crest was François Makandal. I ran to tend Hopping John.

Oreste came to Tipingee with a stick of cane, hiding it in front of him so no one would see. He could get punished for helping himself to his master's produce. Last month the book-keeper had caught Babette chewing on some cane to refresh herself while she cut, and he had put her all night in the stocks with cane juice smeared over her naked body. Mosquitoes and ants had driven her nearly mad before he loosed her and Mer could tend to her swollen shut eyes and the itchy raised bites that covered her. Oreste peeled back the hard rind from the cane with his knife and gave Tipingee the stick to chew. She smiled him thanks, set about gnawing the sweet juice out of the tough white fibres. He smiled back, tucked his knife away. He went and touched Hopping John on the shoulder. Hopping John never moved. "He's going to be all right?" Oreste asked.

Sometimes Mer seemed to Tipingee like the hands of Papa God himself. "People talk but do nothing," the Ginen people said. "Papa God doesn't talk, but he does plenty." Mer, her words remained in her head, but her actions went out into the world. There was healing in her hands. Release.

Standing on the factory floor with sugar cane leaves pricking her calves, Tipingee watched for Mer to come and see to Hopping John. A cockroach waddled out from under some leaves. It was longer than her thumb, fat and drunk on rotting cane. It spread mahogany-brown wings and flew towards the mill. "Pardon, Tipingee." It was Jacques and Oreste, bringing in cane from the wain carts and feeding it into the crushers. Tipingee moved out of their way.

The sugar stench was making her head pound today. The whole six months of crop time, she could never get that heavy sugar smell out of her nose, or the stupid lowing of the oxen pulling the wains, or the hammering, hammering, hammering of the wainwrights and carpenters mending the carts and the troughs the cane juice flowed along. Everything was always breaking, everybody was always working. No free time to go and sit by the clean, peaceful wash of the salt sea and pray to Aziri near her waters.

The book-keeper, overseer of the fields, had made them carry John inside here. Then he'd sent everyone but Tipingee back to work. "Stupid, dumb black," he'd said to her as he stared in horror at John's leg, the flesh of John's heel swollen and discoloured. "Why'd he go and step on that thing?" He'd bent, groaning, to lace his boots tighter. Thick leather. It came up to his calves. Hopping John was in bare feet. "Tipingee, you stay here until matant comes, then you get right back to work, hear?" "Yes, sir."