All Souls' Rising Read online




  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Map of Saint Domingue in the Late Eighteenth Century

  PREFACE

  PROLOGUE

  PART I: BOIS CAYMAN

  (August 1791)

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  PART II: LEUR CAFÉ AU CARAMEL

  (August—November 1791)

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  PART III: EXCHANGE OF PRISONERS

  (November 1791—April 1792)

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  PART IV: ILLUMINATION

  (August 1792—June 1793)

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  ENVOI

  CHRONOLOGY OF HISTORICAL EVENTS

  ANOTHER DEVIL’S DICTIONARY

  Also by Madison Smartt Bell: Master of the Crossroads

  Preview of The Stone That the Builder Refused

  About the Author

  Also by Madison Smartt Bell

  Acclaim for Madison Smartt Bell’s All Souls’ Rising

  Footnotes

  Copyright

  For les Morts et les Mystères,

  and for all souls bound in living bodies,

  I have burned this offering

  Four hundred years…

  (Four hundred years, four hundred years…)

  And it’s the same…

  Same philosophy…

  BOB MARLEY

  Acknowledgments

  This novel was completed with invaluable assistance from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. My thanks also to George Garrett and Russell Banks for good advice and good examples, and to Isabel Reinharez, Caroline Gifford, Tom McGonigle, Cassandra Dunwell, Thomasin LaMay of the Goucher College Library, Caroline Smith of Special Collections at the Johns Hopkins University Libraries, Jennifer Bryan of the Manuscripts Division of the Maryland Historical Society, Daryl Phillip of the Cane Mill Museum of Dominica, and M. Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie of the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, for their critical research assistance—may fortune smile upon you all.

  Preface

  IN 1791, THE COLONY OF SAINT DOMINGUE, established on the western half of the island which Columbus had named Hispaniola and which the native Amerindians (before their wholesale extermination by the Spanish) had called Hayti, was the richest and most productive French possession overseas, known as the Jewel of the Antilles. Plantations in the colony, run by slave labor, produced fortunes in sugar and coffee, which could create for their proprietors, who were frequently absentees, luxurious lives in Paris. From the point of view of French landowners, locally known as grand blancs, Saint Domingue was not a place to settle permanently but a place to get rich quick.

  The shock of the French Revolution in 1789 traveled along social and racial fault lines already present in the colony. The grand blanc landowners, who owned most of the plantations and most of the slaves, were conservative and royalist by disposition and for the most part unfriendly to French Revolutionary radical ideas. By 1791 the idea was already afoot in this group that at worst the colony might splinter off from the home government and reconstitute itself as a royalist refuge or perhaps make itself a protectorate of the British (who maintained slavery in Jamaica and their other Caribbean colonies). The grand blanc royalists in the colony identified themselves by wearing a white cockade and were therefore sometimes known as Pompons Blancs.

  Meanwhile there existed a lower class of white people in the colony, an artisan class mostly concentrated in the two principal cities of the coast: Cap Français (commonly known as Le Cap) in the north and Port-au-Prince in the western department. Members of this group were not necessarily French in origin; they were an obscure and shifting community, including a great many professional criminals, adventurers, and international fugitives. Some originated from an earlier period when the island had been a haven and stronghold of pirates. These petit blancs, who embraced French Revolutionary ideas, were at odds with the grand blanc landowners, and between 1789 and 1791 the struggle between these two groups for political control of the colony sometimes came to violence. The petit blanc revolutionaries distinguished themselves by wearing a red cockade and were known for this reason as Pompons Rouges. Their declared loyalty to the French Revolutionary government led them to call themselves Patriots.

  Whatever their differences among themselves, white people were in a minority in Saint Domingue. In 1791 there were about thirty-nine thousand white people in the colony, twenty-seven thousand people of mixed blood, and four hundred and fifty-two thousand black slaves. The large mulatto population, descendants of white landowners and black slaves, had come into being because there had never been many white women in the colony, which had always attracted opportunists and entrepreneurs rather than settlers proper. Some mulattoes were enslaved but many were free, and there existed a class of freedmen, or affranchis, who were mostly of mixed race, though some full-blooded blacks were also included.

  Sixty-four different shades of color were identified (and named) among the mulattoes, and social status depended on the lightness of the shade. Economically, the mulattoes were a powerful group. Many were wealthy and owned land and slaves of their own, and many had been well educated—sometimes in France. But the mulattoes had no political rights whatsoever. Though required to serve three years in the militia, they could not vote or hold office—only white people played any part in the political life of the colony. Apart from a lively business in prostitution, mulattoes had little social contact with whites, were forced to give precedence to whites in all circumstances, and were sometimes victims of spontaneous genocidal pogroms.

  There was a special animosity between the mulattoes, who had wealth but no political rights, and the petit blancs, who had rights but little money. These tensions were exacerbated after 1789, when the mulattoes began sending delegations to Paris to petition for political equality and voting rights. These delegations found sympathy among the more radical French Revolutionary factions and among abolitionist organizations like Les Amis des Noirs. But in the early phases of the French Revolution, the parties in power believed very firmly that the Rights of Man must apply to white men only. Saint Domingue was one of the few sectors of the French economy still functioning after the Revolution; therefore slavery and the racial hierarchy underwritten by the slave system had to be maintained.

  As for the tremendous number of black slaves, only a minority were Creole (a term designating anyone of any race who was born in the colony). In part because absentee ownership was so common, abuses and cruelty were much more frequent and severe in Saint Domingue than in the southern United States or in most other slaveholding societies. Through suicide, infanticide, abortion, starvation, neglect, overwork, and murder, the black slaves of Saint Domingue died off at a much faster rate than they could replace themselves
by new births. It was necessary for the proprietors to import twenty thousand fresh slaves from Africa annually in order to maintain the workforce at a constant level.

  Thus a two-thirds majority of the slaves in the colony had been born in Africa. They came from ten or twelve different tribes and spoke as many different languages. They communicated with their masters and with one another in a patois with French vocabulary and African syntax; this language, also called Creole, is still spoken in Haiti today. The slave population synthesized a variety of different African religious traditions into a common religion called vodoun or voodoo, which was universal among the African slaves and very common among the Creole slaves also—including those Creole slaves who were nominally Christian. Vodoun, which includes a pantheon of gods who take literal and physical possession of their worshipers, incorporated components of African ancestor worship with a new mythology evolved on slave ships. Practitioners believed that Africa, or Guinée, existed as an island below the sea and that death was the portal of return to Africa.

  Occupied with their quarrels among themselves, the whites of Saint Domingue gave little thought to the possible effects of the French Revolution on the mulattoes and almost none at all to its possible effects on the black slaves. Because of their common economic interests, some queasy and unstable alliances did form between grand blancs and mulattoes. The blacks, who were not generally acknowledged to be fully human, were ignored. Meanwhile, Revolutionary conceptions like “the Rights of Man” circulated freely and noisily through the entire colony and were as audible to the black slaves as to anyone.

  Prologue

  JUNE 15, 1802 ABOARD Le HÉROS

  The weighing of our anchor with this morning’s tide brought me a lightening of my heart. These last few days we’ve been in port were most uneasy, owing to rumors of renewed disturbances, perhaps a more serious revolt, to be inspired by the deportation of the brigand chief Toussaint, our passenger and prisoner. All factions in the city of Le Cap or what remains of it are once again aroused against one another. As for the harbor itself, it is alive with sharks, which feed most avidly upon the flesh of those who take the losing part in struggles on the shore.

  Thus I was greatly comforted to see us well away, to stand on the stern with the breeze freshening in my face, watching the broken soot-stained ruins sink rapidly enough to the horizon. The town of Le Cap has twice been burned to the ground these last ten years, but even at the height of its ostentation it could not, when seen at such a distance, have seemed any more than a most precarious foothold on this savage shore. Rounding the cape, I see that city give way to rocky escarpments plunging vertically into the waves, and above these the incomprehensible blankness of the forests or, where the trees are cut, the peaks standing out as bare and sharp as needles’ points. My sojourn here was brief but more than long enough to satisfy me. Here no enterprise has managed to achieve a good result—the hand of civilized man has done no more than make of a wilderness a desert. Perhaps before Columbus landed, it was some sort of savage Eden here. I believe it would have been better for all if he had never come.

  As we set sail, there stood near me, among my fellow officers of the ship, some members of the company of the renegade slave Toussaint, though that gentleman himself remained carefully sequestered, under guard in his cabin below. The others of his party had so far the freedom of the ship, and I observed them closely as I might, with some thought of indicting their descriptions, though for what audience I do not know.

  The eldest (and by far the blackest) of the women is Suzanne, the wife of Toussaint. She is said to be older than he and showed her years, appearing confused at moments, appearing not to know just where she found herself or how she came there. But for the richness of her dress (which was, however, modest) she might easily have been taken for any ordinary household servant in the colony. The three young mulattresses in her train (a niece, a daughter-in-law, and a companion as I gathered) struck me as rather more soignées, wrapped in that thin layer of hastily acquired sophistication with which one often meets in women of their type.

  The lightest of the men is Toussaint’s eldest son, Placide, though as our Captain Savary has suggested there are some doubts as to his parentage, suspicion that he may be an illegitimate child of Suzanne’s prior to the marriage (yet Toussaint acknowledges and indeed is said to favor him). His light color may have occasioned this speculation, though often the Aradas, from which tribe Toussaint is extracted, are similarly light or of a reddish hue.

  As for the two younger sons, Isaac and Jean, it is plain at a glance that they are full-blooded Negroes. The former wears a most extravagant uniform, every inch of it bedizened with gold braid and rosettes, complete with an enormous sword, the tip of it dragging the boards of the deck, whose bearer appears to have no notion of its use. The hilted weapon seems only to encumber the natural movement of his hands along his sides. With all its meaningless pomp this uniform shows marked signs of wear, hard wear at that, and Isaac seems to sulk inside it—a bedraggled peacock, caught in a rainstorm.

  I have heard, from Captain Savary and others, that this uniform was the personal gift of Bonaparte to Toussaint’s second son. Placide was presented with another like it, on the same occasion, but no longer wears it.

  The eighth and last of the party looks a miscellany of ill-assembled and badly chosen parts, being overly tall, gangly, poorly proportioned and clumsy in all respects, all thumbs and elbows. His neck is elongated, with a busy Adam’s apple the size of a garden spade, and, above, his head appears ridiculously small. He rolls his eyes and stutters when he speaks, and his outsized, long-fingered hands creep about all over his person like great agitated spiders the while. This singular creature is Toussaint’s valet, known by the fanciful appellation of Mars Plaisir. For the moment, he cannot practice his intended vocation, since Toussaint is held strictly apart from all this retinue, not permitted to see any of his retainers or even any member of his family. A pointless severity, I should think, yet I would willingly be deprived of the attentions of a Mars Plaisir. In almost any European village I would expect a creature such as he to be set upon and stoned to death.

  Now the very thought of Europe makes me puzzle at my enterprise, for these notes are addressed to no one, nor could I find opportunity to send them anywhere at all these next six weeks at sea. Yet I continue, for there have been other curiosities this day. At even (his family and retainers being at table below), Toussaint was fetched on deck to take the air, under guard of two dragoons detached from Captain-General Leclerc’s expedition. Those soldiers seemed to tower over him, for he is only a small Negro man and unremarkable at first glance, more noteworthy for the incongruity of his dress than for any distinguishing feature of his person. He wore a loose white shirt or smock, coarsely woven and open at the neck, over tight trousers from a military uniform, and a pair of high cavalry boots. There was a kerchief bound over his head, and I remembered hearing that Toussaint affected such a covering, not only in his déshabillé but often even on occasions of state.

  I had the watch, but the sea was calm and the sky clear, with the first stars just beginning to emerge, and I approached a little nearer. He did not seem at all aware of my proximity, but stood near the stern rail to stare most intently down at the water (there being no longer any land in view). Not knowing what to say to him, or if I ought to speak at all, I was silent for some minutes before inquiring, what it might be that he was so carefully regarding.

  And here the sentinel’s attention abruptly returned to his charge, and he undertook to prevent our conversation, but I overrode him, repeating my question and adding to it, whether Toussaint was looking back toward the island of which he had lately been master, and whether he regretted it.

  At this, Toussaint turned half toward me and looked at me with half a smile, but without immediately speaking. I suppose he must have gone a lengthy while without much benefit of human discourse. Still, there was a sort of slyness in that smile. His lips were full and heavy
, his teeth long and yellow; he lacked an eyetooth on the left side. The jaw long and slung far forward, stretching and lowering the deep oval of his face. His nose was long also and typically flat, but his forehead was high and his eyes, with their yellowing whites, were large and expressive—his best feature. All in all, a most arresting ugliness.

  He was smaller than I somehow had expected, standing no higher than my breastbone. His disproportionately long trunk was set on little bandy legs—undoubtedly he would appear to best advantage on horseback. Some grizzled hair appeared at his shirt’s neck, and the gray pigtail hanging from under the kerchief was fastened with a bit of frayed red ribbon. I would have put him in the middle fifties. He was narrow-hipped and distinctly thin, though not to the point of frailty—his arms were disproportionately thick and muscular.

  He returned my looks, taking my measure also it may be, and then resumed his staring at the water.

  “Guinée,” he said, but so softly I scarce caught the word at all.

  “Africa?” I said, with some surprise.

  Of course he was not looking in the right direction, but one would hardly expect him to be a master of geography, outside of the colony. He is himself a Creole and I believe this must have been the first time he had ever been to sea. I found that my gaze was drawn after his; he continued to inspect the surfaces of the ocean for some time before he spoke. The water had taken on a red metallic glimmer from the light of the setting sun.

  “Guinée, on dit, se trouve en bas de l’eau.” Still Toussaint kept his eyes fixed on the water. They say that Africa is at the bottom of the ocean.

  “But you are a Christian,” I said, for I was again surprised, though it was not the first time I had heard of this belief. One often finds the slavers complaining of it—how their new-bought slaves will fling themselves off the ships in droves, believing that they may pass beneath the ocean to regain their original homes in Africa.