Post by Cartier on Mar 1, 2021 23:27:39 GMT -5
1492
The first of two great white demons arrived and left a trail of death and despair. Cristoforo Colombo thought he had sailed to the entrance to Heaven itself, and proceeded to turn it into Hell on Earth, as the Arawak inhabitants were soon subjugated and slaughtered. For this, he would be venerated among white men for centuries.
Colombo enslaved the natives, and in less than a decade, his supply of aboriginal manpower waning, the Spaniards created a contract that may as well have been signed by the devil himself, as it allowed for the purchase and use of African Slaves, forever tinging the Western Hemisphere with blood spilled by evil in the name of god.
In the 1700s, one of the greatest white devils in the history of the world, Napoleon Bonaparte, sent his soldiers across the Atlantic Ocean to the island he knew as Hispaniola. For two hundred years already at this point, the native Taino had been displaced more and more not only by Europeans but by the slaves they imported from Africa.
These slaves brought with them not only the pain and the anger of being enslaved - they brought with them gods from their homeland. Beliefs rooted deep into their souls that the white men didn’t understand. The French looked at their black-skinned field chattel as if they were possessed by demons.
Over the years, the Africans mingled with the French. They learned of the Madonna and her son, the Christ. They absorbed him. They took the Madonna for themselves, the way they had been taken by the Europeans years before. They had already learned the true name of their land by then, Haiti, and had connected with the spirits of the island. All that was missing was the mother.
When the Polish mercenaries arrived in the early 1800s at the time of Jean-Francois Dessalines and his revolution, they brought with them a goddess which they thought was merely a painting of their Madonna. The virginal mother of their savior, their Christ. Their King. The Africans knew in their bones that the mother of a King was more than a King. She was a Goddess. And this one, painted in vibrant colors on fine canvas and framed in sculpted wood, the slaves stood agog when they saw the woman the Polish had brought with them, for she was nothing like the Polish themselves.
The Mother of their King was regal and poised and had eyes full of fire. She wore a crown of seven jewels and wore finery. Halos emanated from her head as well as that of her young baby in her arms, the one in whose name these white men had sailed so far for so long.
The Madonna’s skin was Black.
1791
“Ecouter…”
Jean-Francois Papillon crouched behind the brush with his partner, Georges Biassou, as they leaned over a tree stump and looked down below at the sugar plantation.
“Georges… they do not expect a thing.”
His French had taken on the patois that would later become so well known among the Creoles. Jean-Francois knew that they were moments from igniting a revolution. He and Georges breathed heavily, both understanding the gravity that lived in this moment.
“The time has come. The sun is at our backs, the farmers will burn their eyes when they turn to face us. Did you warn the slaves?”
Georges was momentarily worried, as it took Jean-Francois a long moment to reply. He breathed a sigh of relief once he did, however.
“Yes, of course. And the affranchi as well. Their lodging is empty. Only the white men remain.”
“Then it is time we light the spark of freedom, brother.”
“Indeed… but first, we pray.”
Georges and Jean-Francois lowered their heads and held one another’s hands. Earlier in the evening the two had broken bread together and spoken of the Madonna. They raised their glasses to her. Swore their fealty to her. To her, and to Haiti.
Now, as they closed their eyes, they each felt a warm heat and smelled lavender on the air just in front of their noses. As they opened their eyes wide, their mouths hung open. The Matron herself was standing before them, aglow. Her dark skin was supple and her linen clothing moved in breezes that the two men could not feel.
“Is it her, Jean-Francois?”
“It is, my friend… it can be none other than Erzulie Dantor herself...”
“Rise to your feet like men when I speak to you. Do not cower in the sugarcane like slaves.”
Her voice seemed to come from the backs of their heads, though she stood directly in front of them. Her eyes shone like gemstones as the sun at their backs dazzled its setting light directly onto her face, though she threw no shadow upon the ground.
The two men stood as she demanded of them, looking back and forth to see if the plantation owners at the bottom of the hill had looked up to find them.
“They cannot see you, Georges. You are safe with me.”
“Y-you know my name?”
“I know the names of all of my children. You and Jean-Francois are here this evening to carry out the destiny that our blood carries. In the lands of your grandfathers, you would not have been slaves. You would have been warriors. You would have been high priests. You would have been kings. Instead, these men whose very skin wilts in the light of day hold you under their yoke like oxen to till their fields. They steal your children. They rape your wives. They sell your brothers. And at night, they sleep in luxury on this beautiful island, the one which they bathed in the blood of its own children. Tonight… tonight you will no longer bow your heads as beasts of burden, you will raise your heads with the war cry of the kings you were meant to be. And you will raze this ill-gotten paradize to embers in the grass.”
“Madame Erzulie…”
Jean-Francois’ voice trembled, he felt the steel of the Madonna’s gaze piercing into his eyes, riveting him in place.
“Madame Erzulie, we have come here because I heard you calling to me in my sleep. I have done all that you asked. I have brought the tools needed for this… we want nothing more than freedom four our families and our brethren… but I am not murderer! I do not wish to slaughter these men…”
Erzulie Dantor looked down at Jean-Francois and her face hardened. She rose from the ground, floating several inches above the soil, blades of grass still sticking to the soles of her bare feet.
“This is not a time to lose your resolve, Jean-Francois. This… though you do not yet know it as such… is a war. I know you feel the drumbeats in your veins. I know you see the spark of spear on shield in your eyes. I know you smell the bitterness of blood on your tongue, both your own as well as that of your enemies. You must rise from the shackles of your enslavement and use that steel as a knife to cut into the gut of your oppressors. For if you waver tonight, if you turn away and refuse to spill the blood that needs to be spilled in order to please the gods of old, then these white demons will murder your sons and your daughters. They will burn their skin with whip cracks and break their bones with treacherous workloads. Your descendents will live as you have lived, in chains, if you fail them tonight. For your children to be free, you have no choice but to murder the men who hold them in servitude. There is no other way, Monsieur.”
Erzulie floated down toward Jean-Francois then, meeting him eye to eye. He felt her fingers on his shoulders like branding irons. The rage within her, burning for vengeance, felt as if it would cook the meat of him right on his bones.
“This will not be the last time you slaughter wolves for the sake of sheep. Hold onto your courage. Remember your children, and remember your ancestors.”
In a blink she was gone. Georges and Jean-Francois did not speak as they lit their torches and quietly tread down the hillock toward the plantation buildings. They did not make eye contact until the sugarcane was roaring with flames, and the houses were piles of ash.
“It has begun, Jean-Francois.”
Georges stated, his voice dry from the heat.
“Yes Georges. It has begun. But will it ever end?”
1804
The French were defeated. Leclerc and Rochambeau had failed to keep the rich colony under the Fleur-De-Lis, the former falling to illness and the latter sent back to Europe a prisoner after escaping Cap Francais.
The Madonna, Erzulie Dantor, had protected her children as she had promised to do - but also as she had promised, the blood was not yet done being spilled.
“Mother Madonna, I pray for your strength and your guidance… I pray for your blessing and your wisdom…”
Jean-Jacques Dessalines held his head in his hands. Not long after the French withdrew from the place they called Saint-Domingue, the land Dessalines had promptly declared to be a liberated Haiti, Dessalines had executed nearly a thousand remaining French soldiers.
Dessalines had promised that the other white men living in Haiti would be safe from any vengeance… but the pressures were building to change his mind.
As he sat and he prayed, he felt a presence. A warm hand on his shoulder, and the scent of wild grass.
“Lift your head up, King, you have a nation to rule.”
“Erzulie Dantor… the Madonna… can it be?”
Jean-Jacques sat up, turning his eyes to meet those staring down at him with an otherworldly glow. The radiance around Erzulie’s brown skin seemed to emanate from within her, and her gown moved as if she were beneath waves of the sea itself.
“It can and it is. You have no time for mercy, Jean-Jacques Dessalines. You have no room in history for weakness and kindness. To be gentle to your captor is to remain captive. To be just to the unjust will lead only to your own doom.”
Her fingers ran through the hair on his scalp, soothing, yet burning at the same time. It was as if she were massaging the hunger for vengeance into his brain.
“There are still French on the island, and still you consider yourself free… you will never be free, King Jean-Jacques, until the scourge of evil these men brought to this island. The spirits of the natives are in unrest. The spirits of your predecessors, brought to this place in irons, are unable to rest as long as the white man lives happily among you as if they were not the progenitors of this terrible deed. Their blood, it had to run until every drop is gone. Their flesh has to burn until their memory is wiped away. You, Jean-Jacques, you are the one to bring balance to Haiti. You fought as a warrior. Now you rule as a king. But yet to come for you is to be worshipped as a god. The only way into this pantheon is to make the sacrifice the island is yearning for. Spill their blood. Kill the white men who do not deserve the air in their lungs, who sweeten their meals with sugar sowed and tilled by enslaved men. Men like you.”
Emperor Jacques I looked back to where Erzulie Dantor had stood moments before, but found that she was no longer there. When he stood again, his cheeks were dry. His heart burned with anger. And every thought in his mind was for vengeance toward the white man.
By the end of the year, thousands of whites would be slaughtered in the streets of Haiti, as the bloodthirsty ruler travelled from city to city to exact his revenge on the Europeans who had enslaved his people. From Port-au-Prince to Cap-Haitien, the blood flowed in rivers.
Not long after, the Vodou priests of Haiti would find their way to New Orleans.
All in the name of Erzulie Dantor.
The Black Madonna.
“Miles…”
Cartier sits in a dark room, smoking from a ceremonial pipe. Her hair is adorned with various feathers and straws, her face is made up in bright colors. Stretched across her curvaceous form, sheer linens lie on her skin like clouds floating in the azure sky.
“Did you think the journey ended when I beat you last time, Miles?”
She inhaled deeply, allowing lengthy, unblinking eye contact with the camera before letting tendrils of thick smoke escape her nostrils.
“I hope you pay attention to history, Miles, because too many men don’t. When you try to rule over the unruly, you end up on a guillotine. When your neck is too weak to hold up the crown you’ve accepted, your head is left rolling on the floor.”
She laughs, taking another inhalation.
“Do you think the colonizers of the Caribbean deserved to die, Miles? Do you think their genocide erases the sin of the genocide they themselves perpetuated and benefited from over centuries? Do you think they knew, Miles, when the executioner arrived at their door, that they deserved to die? Does a champion, when he enters the field of combat against a foe that has defeated him - soundly, I might add - in the past, know that his time on the throne has come to an end, whether he feels it is just or not?”
Cartier stands then, her golden jewelry tinkling as she moves.
“Let me explain history to you, Miles, because if there is one thing to truly understand, it’s the fact that it always has an’ always will repeat itself. Those men who overthrew the French in Haiti? They were then held in debt by France… with the support and backing of the United States of America. The land of the free, as you might have heard. The land that was so terrified of what they saw happen in Haiti, that they refused to emancipate the millions of enslaved African men and women until half a century later… and even then, it took a war that in some ways never really ended. Haiti became one of the poorest nations on Earth, because even in their freedom, they were still enslaved to the colonizers.”
She runs her hand along the back of the settee she’d risen from, playing with the upholstery.
“Our history is going to repeat itself as well, Miles. Though you an’ I, we don’t move in cycles the way the white men of Europe and the black men of Africa have. There won’t be any period where our fortunes reverse. For you, Miles, history will stay exactly the same as it has been. You are going to be dominated. You are going to be forcibly removed from the castle you’ve built for yourself, brick by brick, hollow victory by hollow victory, because you… you are not made from the DNA of warriors. You are not descended from the flesh of gods and kings. Your reign is made of paper, King Miles, and the necks of those you stood on top of to reach these great heights remained bowed, but unbroken. But now? Now, Miles, your foothold has been removed. The shoulders to tread upon are no longer slumped. The usurper… the pretender who wears a crown too heavy for his head… you will be usurped, Miles. You will be dragged from your castle, kicking and screaming, and beheaded in front of the world. And while your blood is still warm, running through the cracks of the broken street, your crown will find its new home atop the head of a true, deserving, ruler.”
Cartier paces through the dark room, her long fingernails clicking against one another as she stretches her fingers open and closed first into fists and then into talons.
“Revolution Wrestlin’ is no longer going to be suffering under the weight of carrying a pretender on its throne. No longer will the powers that be of this company have to answer for WHY their alleged champion is so weak. WHY their alleged champion is so easily defeated. WHY their alleged champion is so prone to being proven to be nothing more than a fraud, a beneficiary of a system set in place hundreds of years ago to protect and provide not for the strong, not for the worthy, not for the righteous… but for the weak, the evil, and the unwell. You, Miles Way, have rode on the wave of privilege for long enough. From the moment I found my way to the shores of your Kingdom, your crown was already mine.”
A smirk.
“The only thing left is the coronation. And that, Miles, is happening at Allegiance. A word you have probably said with your hand over your heart since you were a little boy, dreaming of bigger things that you would never have to fully earn… because you came from the land of the free for some, but cruel for most.”
She smiles in the dark, revealing golden veneers across her bright white teeth. She wets her full lips and speaks again, her voice thundering. Her heartbeat thuds in her chest, and it seems audible to the listener, as if it were beating within their eardrums.
“This, Miles, is America. Where vengeance is meted out in the streets for centuries of bloodletting.”
Finally, Cartier stands directly in front of the lens - her eyes narrow and without the slightest waver.
“Do you hear the beats of the drum?”