The Stone that the Builder Refused Read online

  Bon jour à toute pour moi. Je les pryer d’être bien comporté, beacoup de sageste, et la vertus. Je vous sé déjà dire que vous sète responsable de lheure conduite devant Dieu et à votre maris, mandé moi ci Placide et tavec vous.

  Je vous sanbras tout tandrement. Je suis pour la vis votre fidèle époux.4

  Toussaint Louverture

  Then it seemed that Suzanne was near him for a moment, without the bars and the frozen stone walls and the free-falling descents from the cliffs of these Jura Mountains. He calmed, and a generous glow of warmth spread below his breast bone. The dangerous spirit of self-destruction had withdrawn. Without emotion, he recalled Blanc Cassenave, who’d died in the jail where Toussaint had sent him, so furious at the injustice he felt he’d received that his heart had exploded in his chest. But it was he himself, and not Toussaint, who’d broken faith and turned to treachery—Blanc Cassenave died by the work of his own hands.

  The warmth enclosed him now, embraced the surface of his skin. His arms sank down, hands dangling from the wooden arms of his chair. Though the pressure grew uncomfortable on his upper arms, he was not inspired to alter his position. Again he felt Suzanne’s near presence, stirring soupe giraumon in the dooryard of the little house they’d shared at Bréda long ago. He smelled the soup and heard the little cocks so proudly crowing on the slopes of Morne du Cap, and he could hear his three sons breathing near him in the darkness before dawn.

  His head snapped back. Before him on the wall appeared the face of a black man, a strong face struggling under terrible duress, cords in his neck stretched to the limit and the eyes and teeth a white rictus of torment and pain. Dieudonné. This was Dieudonné, he knew, though he had never seen his face. His undoing had been accomplished through intermediaries, and at a distance of many miles (though not so long as the distance between Saint Domingue and France). Dieudonné would have taken the ten thousand men he led to join the English invaders at Port-au-Prince (such had been the appearance of the thing), but instead he was betrayed by one of his own seconds and delivered to the mulatto general Rigaud in the south, then locked in a prison where, the story had come back long afterward, he suffocated slowly beneath a weight of chains.

  All this was only fever dream. Carefully, Toussaint brought his aching head upright. The tortured face had faded from the wall, and if its glistening surface now resembled the mirrored face of a calm sea, that too was an illusion of his fever.

  Receding now, though the pain in his head was worse. The castle bell had been tolling but he had not counted the strokes. The clock on the shelf, notoriously unreliable, read half-past four.

  And if the spirit of Dieudonné had risen from beneath the waters to confront him, then? Dieudonné had been free to choose. The choice had been laid plain before him by a letter from Toussaint. Quand il s’agit de faire le bien on ne doit jamais retarder. If he had not hesitated, all might have come out otherwise. And Dieudonné was not alone. There were others, many others: Rigaud himself, Joseph Flaville, Toussaint’s adopted nephew Moyse in all his terrible particulars. Each and every one of them the author of his own doom.

  Toussaint had reached an islet of stability somewhere amid the ocean of his fever. He crouched and blew the dormant coals to life and built the fire to a considerable brightness. There was now just a little fuel to spare, since during his delirium he’d used none.

  However, he must make good use of the present interval of lucidity. He warmed his hands till they flexed easily, then pushed himself upright and went to the small square table. The writing implements were still at hand, though the secretary had long since departed. He arranged the pen, the ink, the paper, and sat for a moment looking down on them.

  He would not allow the spirit of embitterment to devour him. Between betrayer and betrayed it was equal in the end, when they should come together beneath the mapou tree, or when the crossroads sprang upright before their faces, for their judgment . . . The truth was that Toussaint had known, when he kept his rendezvous with Brunet, what would follow. Or it seemed to him now that he had known then, just as, when he first saw Leclerc’s great fleet assembling off Point Samana, he had known the secret orders of the First Consul which it bore—orders to which only Leclerc and a very few of his entourage had been privy. As he knew also, certainly enough, the outcome of his present situation.

  In the end it was all one. And now there was one more letter to write. He lit the stub of candle affixed to the table top by its own melted wax, dipped the pen in the ink and began.

  Au Cachot du Fort de Joux, ce 17 Vendémiaire

  Je vous pri au nom de Dieu au nom de l’humanité de jai té un cou deuille favorable sur ma réclamation, sur ma position et ma famille, employé votre Grand Génie sur ma conduite, sur la mannière que je servis ma patris, sur toutes les dangés que je courir an faisant ma devoire, j’ai servis ma patrie avec fidelité et probité jai les servis avec zèlle et courage, et jai été devoué à mon gouvernement. J’ai sacrifié mon sant et emporté ce que je pocede pour la servire et malgré mes séfort tous mé travaux a été envin, vous me permettrai premiere consulde vous dire avec tout les respec et las soumition que je vous doit: le Gouvernement a été tromppé entièrement sur le conte de Toussaint Louverture, sur une de cé plus zellé et couragé serviteurs à Saint Domingue. J’ai travaillé depuis lontans pour aquiérire l’honneur et la gloire de mon gouvernement et atire lestime de mes concitoien, et je suis aujourd’hui couronné des sépines et lingratitude le plus marqué pour recompence, et je ne desavoue pas les fautes que je pourais faire et je vous sant fait mé excuse, mais ce parti ne vaut les care de la punition que je reçu ni les traitement que jai essuies: premier Consul, il est mal heureux pour moi, denet pasconnus de vous, ci vous mavé connus au fon pendant que jai été à Saint Domingue, vous ceré tranquilsur mon conte et me rendré plus de justice, mon interrieur est Bon.5

  And here he faltered. It seemed to him that if only his accuser, judge, could see him face-to-face and know him to the core, then the future would be redeemed. This thought was the very truth, he felt, and at the same time illusion of his fever. The words were squirming on the page like knots of insect larvae, the whole room rocked to the rhythm of the wooden ship that had conveyed him into this cold land. Carefully he laid the pen aside, so as not to blot his paper, leaned back and let the fever take him.

  PREFACE

  In 1776 the American Revolution began in the guise of a tax revolt, while proclaiming self-evident natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In 1789 the French Revolution began as a violent class struggle, declaring an ideology of liberty, equality, and brotherhood among all men. That all white men were intended went without saying.

  In 1791 what would become known as the Haitian Revolution began as a rebellion of African slaves against their white masters in the French colony of Saint Domingue. Ripples expanding from the French Revolution had begun reaching Saint Domingue two years before. The whites of the colony, who numbered some forty thousand, were bitterly divided between Jacobin Revolutionaries of the lower economic classes and the large property holders, who were more likely to be royalists and who hoped to make Saint Domingue a refuge for the ancien régime. These two classes agreed only on the absolute necessity of denying political rights to the people of mixed European and African blood who inhabited the colony. Many of these gens de couleur, as they were called, had been educated in Europe; many owned property and slaves themselves. Recognized as a third race under the French slave system, this group had begun, on the eve of the French Revolution, to agitate for political privileges to match its already considerable economic power. Repression from the whites (who had fathered this third race) was extraordinarily vicious. The first genocidal pogroms in Saint Domingue were conducted by whites against mulattoes in the mid-1780s. In 1790 a final mulatto uprising ended with the ringleaders, Ogé and Chavannes, being tortured to death in a public square in the town of Cap Français.

  In 1791 there were about twenty-eight thousan
d free persons of color in Saint Domingue, or a little less than the number of whites. Both groups depended for their prosperity—in what had become France’s richest colony and the source for much of Europe’s sugar and coffee— on the labor of at least seven hundred thousand black slaves, of whom over half had been born in Africa. The conditions of slavery in Saint Domingue were so atrocious that the slave population did not reproduce itself—an importation of more than twenty thousand per year was necessary to maintain a stable work force. The fighting of the white slave masters among themselves and against the mulattoes took place within their view, while the revolutionary events in France and Europe were discussed within their hearing. The carelessness of the whites in this hazardous situation can only be explained by their belief that their slaves were something other and less than human.

  The slaves set out to prove them wrong. By the autumn of 1791 most of the colony’s vast sugar plantations had been destroyed by fire, a great many white colonists had been massacred, and many more had fled. Those who held on were isolated in the cities of the coast; the interior had become an anarchy traveled by roaming bands of rebel slaves. Over the next several years the situation of Saint Domingue degenerated into a three-way genocidal race war in which each race did everything in its power to exterminate the other two. Meanwhile the European powers— England, Spain, and France—circled the perimeter, hoping to regain a foothold.

  On August 29, 1793, the same day that the French Revolutionary Commissioner Léger Félicité Sonthonax proclaimed the abolition of slavery in Cap Français, another proclamation issued from the camps of the rebel slaves in the mountains: “Brothers and Friends, I am Toussaint Louverture. My name is perhaps not unknown to you. I have undertaken to avenge you. I want liberty and equality to reign throughout Saint Domingue. I am working toward that end. Come and join me, brothers, and fight by our side for the same cause.”

  Since the fall of 1791, the man formerly known as Toussaint Bréda had been among the armed bands of rebel slaves in the interior—bands that were nominally in the service of the Spanish government in the eastern half of the island, though not under much actual Spanish control. Toussaint was over fifty years old when the first uprisings broke out. Born in slavery, he could read and write, had served as an overseer on Bréda plantation, and had some knowledge of both native and European medicine. He served the rebel leaders as a doctor first, then began to assemble his own fighting force—small at first, but unusually well trained and well disciplined. When he learned that the French National Assembly had abolished slavery, he turned on the other black leaders who were still in the service of royalist Spain, drove them over the border, and made himself master of the chain of mountain forts called the Cordon de l’Ouest, which controlled the passages between the Northern and Western Departments of Saint Domingue. That much accomplished, he offered his services to General Etienne Laveaux, who commanded for Revolutionary France in the colony.

  Toussaint’s volte-face turned what had seemed inevitable defeat for the French in Saint Domingue into victory. Acting as Laveaux’s second-in-command, Toussaint repelled both Spanish and British invasions from the colony between 1794 and 1798. Laveaux hailed him as “the Black Spartacus,” and made him Lieutenant Governor of Saint Domingue. Meanwhile, Toussaint proved himself to be as adept in politics as on the battlefield. Outmaneuvered by the black leader, Commissioner Sonthonax returned to France in 1797; Laveaux followed him not long after. A new commission headed by General Thomas Hédouville, sent to reassert the authority of the French government, succeeded only in fomenting a bloody civil war between the blacks led by Toussaint and the mulatto faction.

  When Toussaint’s forces had won this struggle, Toussaint stood unchallenged as the de facto ruler of Saint Domingue. He seems never to have intended to make the colony independent (when offered a British alliance if he would crown himself king, he refused it), but rather to govern it as a French protectorate. By 1801 he had done much to stabilize the war-ravaged territory and had made real progress in restoring the economy, inviting the exiled white planters, whose expertise was needed, to return and manage their properties with free labor. The foundation of a society based on liberty and on genuine equality and brotherhood among Saint Domingue’s three races appeared to be in place. Toussaint consolidated these gains by creating a constitution for the colony which, among other things, appointed him governor for life, with the right to choose his own successor.

  France, meanwhile, had passed through the Terror into reaction. When Toussaint sent his constitution to the capital for ratification, Napoleon Bonaparte, though not yet Emperor, ruled under the title of First Consul. The story that Toussaint began his letter to Napoleon with the phrase “from the first of the blacks to the first of the whites” is apocryphal, though inspired by real similarities between these two extraordinary self-made men, who each had risen to power through the military. Napoleon would certainly have recognized their likeness, though perhaps he was mistaken to measure Toussaint’s ambition by his own. The strongest ideological objections to slavery had been swept away with the Terror, and Napoleon was under serious pressure to restore the slave system in the French colonies, from factions of dispossessed Caribbean planters who included his own consort, Josephine. No doubt his vanity was pricked by the temerity of Toussaint’s constitution, which could easily have appeared to be a declaration of independence in all but name. But Napoleon was very much a pragmatist, and he saw the attraction of accepting Toussaint’s cooperation so as to use his forces and the base of Saint Domingue not only to threaten the English in the Caribbean but also to secure or even expand the French presence on the North American continent, via Louisiana, then still a French possession. So the decision would not have been an obvious one for him.

  Part One

  DEBAKMEN

  December 1801–February 1802

  J’ai à me reprocher une tentative sur cette colonie, lors du consulat; c’était une grande faute que de vouloir la soumettrepar la force; je devais me contenter de la gouverner par l’intermédiaire de Toussaint.

  —Napoleon Bonaparte, Mémorial de Saint-Hélène

  I have to reproach myself for an attempt on that colony during the Consulate; it was a big mistake to want to subdue it by force; I ought to have contented myself with governing it through the intermediary of Toussaint.

  1

  James Howarth, captain of the Merry Bell, rolled sideways to the edge of his hospital cot and heaved black bile into the gourd coui which Zabeth held trembling beneath his wide-strained jaws. Doctor Hébert leaned forward to steady her, a hand on her spine. When Captain Howarth had done vomiting and collapsed onto the cot, the doctor took the stinking gourd from her hands.

  “Give him the tea,” he told her, leaning to wipe a thread of the bloody vomit from the patient’s chin. Zabeth rose, her head lowered, and walked out into the hospital courtyard, where the infusion simmered over a charcoal brazier. The doctor watched her with a mild dissatisfaction. Her legs moved jerkily, stiff from fear. Zabeth was an excellent nurse for almost any illness, but not for mal de Siam, the yellow fever.

  He carried the gourd out of the hospital enclosure and emptied it into the ravine behind the wall. Used for the dumping of various ordures, the ravine was slightly fetid, especially in this season, when rainfall was thin. Bad air. It was a fault in the location of the hospital, though otherwise the place was good, high on a generally windswept slope at the upper edge of the town of Cap Français. In this still weather, though, the ravine bred mosquitoes. Irritably the doctor pinched one from the hollow of his throat, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together till the blood splotch came away in brownish crumbs.

  When he returned to the hospital gate, he saw with relief that Guiaou was just coming in, accompanied by the three women he’d brought to help him through the night. Guiaou had lately been promoted corporal in the honor guard of Governor-General Toussaint Louverture, but he was willing to spend many of his off-duty hours tending the hospital
in order to earn something extra for his family. Doctor Hébert had trained him as an assistant on various battlefields of the recent wars and had a perfect confidence in him. There was no disease that gave him pause; Guiaou feared nothing except water.

  The doctor glanced once more into the dormitory. Captain Howarth lay quiescent, flanked by three of his crewmen and the second officer of the Merry Bell. They’d all fallen ill the day after the trading packet moored in Le Cap harbor, following a zigzag voyage up the Windward Islands from the South American continent and the Orinoco River. Two of the crew were barely breathing; the doctor doubted they would last the night.

  He beckoned to Zabeth and led her from the hospital. Guiaou appeared to bolt the gate behind them. The doctor reached through the bars and touched the back of Guiaou’s hand; the two of them exchanged a glance and a nod. It was not the first death watch he’d shared with Guiaou, but somehow he was particularly grateful to be relieved of this one.

  He walked down the sloping street from the hospital, stealing the odd glance at Zabeth, who came a pace or two behind. Don’t be afraid, he wanted to tell her. He had already told her that. About ten years earlier, when still in her teens, Zabeth had survived a bout of yellow fever, the same that had killed among others the doctor’s brother-in-law Martin Thibodet. Zabeth had nearly died herself—as had the doctor when his turn to take the fever came a couple of years later. But those few who lived would not fall prey to the same disease again; it was not like malaria, which revisited its sufferers often enough. The doctor was sure of that and that alone. It was almost all he understood of la fièvre jaune, but his own experience proved it well enough. He had announced the point to Zabeth several times and explained that her survival and immunity was the exact reason he had chosen her to nurse these men.