SEVEN
Written without benefit of a secretary, and thus in a roughly phonetic French, Toussaints last letters to Napoleon strike a note of pathos: “I beg you in the name of God in the name of humanity to cast a favorable glance upon my claim, on my position and my family … I have worked for a long time to acquire honor and glory from my government and to attract the esteem of my fellow citizens, and I am today crowned with thorns and with the most marked ingratitude for recompense.”1
As for his position in his prison, he had described it earlier in his official memoir: “Is it not to cut off someone's legs and order him to walk? Is it not to cut out his tongue and tell him to talk? Is it not to bury a man alive?”2 A draft of these poignant lines, written in Toussaints phonetic French, was found after his death in the folds of the head cloth he always wore as a talisman of the spirits that walked with him. The last document he was able to conceal from his jailers, it meant so much to him that during the last days of his life he kept it bound to the bones of his head. To place it so was a magical act: a plea to the unseen world for justice.
To bury Toussaint Louverture alive seems to have been Napoleon Bonaparte's exact intention. To make a martyr of the black leader would be as dangerous as to allow him to return to Saint Domingue. There had never been any intention to offer him the stage which a military trial would have afforded. He remained in his dungeon—in the innermost circle of five enclosures, defended by its rings of moats and drawbridges. As the winter months wore on, a series of small humiliations, all ordered from Paris, harried him in the direction of anonymity. His watch was taken from him, and his last correspondence, including the letters from Leclerc and Brunet which had betrayed him into arrest. For his general's uniform had been substituted the rough woolen clothing of an ordinary French mountain peasant. “I presume,” wrote the minister of marine, “that you have removed from him everything that might have any rapport with a uniform, Toussaint is his name; that is the sole appellation which should be given him.”3
The minister ordered that Toussaint should receive “appropriate treatment, that he should be sufficiently clothed and warmed.”4 Exactly what that meant in practice can be deduced from the result. Although the records of the fortress show that more was spent on Toussaint's maintenance than on many other prisoners there, his situation was not a healthy one for an elderly man who had never before left the tropics, and it was not intended to be. Though Toussaint was not absolutely starved to death, his rations left him undernourished. Though he was not absolutely left to die of exposure, he was given meager fuel for his fire.
At the end of January 1803, he began to complain of illness, but was never treated by a doctor. On April 7, he was found dead in his chair by the hearth of his cell. An autopsy revealed signs of a fatal respiratory infection, encouraged by malnutrition and the bitter mountain cold, and probably given an initial foothold by the old wounds to his head. His body was interred in an unmarked grave in a sort of potter's field for old soldiers at the Fort de Joux. There was to be no martyrdom for Toussaint Louverture, and there would be no relics either.
These very systematic efforts to erase the existence of Toussaint Louverture proved to be completely futile. Months before Toussaint drew his last breath, Captain General Leclerc expired in Saint Domingue of yellow fever. Most of his enormous army followed him into the grave, casualties of either disease or the combat which had reopened on a grand scale in July 1802, when news arrived in Saint Domingue of the restoration of slavery in Guadeloupe. What Toussaint had predicted on the deck of L'Heros about the depth, extension, and tenacity of the roots of the tree of black liberty in Saint Domingue proved to be absolutely true. It was not enough to have removed Toussaint, as Leclerc had woefully reported. To regain mastery of Saint Domingue really would have required the extermination of most of the black population, and if the French were willing to undertake just that, in the end they were not able.
Certainly Toussaint had foreseen this outcome, and it is possible that in permitting himself to be arrested, he had intentionally sacrificed his personal career to it. That argument is undermined by all the evidence of intelligent self-interest throughout Toussaint's history—but in the end one can hardly dispute Aime Cesaire's contention that “Toussaint had the tragic sense of life: on the one hand he was a Christian, sincerely and not as a feint as some have insinuated; and on the other hand, a contemporary of the French Revolution, he saw, like so many others among its contemporaries, the modern form of destiny. To die like Brissot. Like Robespierre. For a long time, he had prepared himself for that eventuality. Still more, he knew it was inevitable.'5
During this time, Napoleon Bonaparte also seemed to be governed by a strange fatality. On May 20,1802, he had proclaimed a law which made his intentions regarding slavery quite unmistakable: according to Article 3, “The trade in blacks and their importation into the said colonies will take place in conformity with the law and rules existing before the said epoque of 1789.”6 By this clause the status quo before the French Revolution was to be restored, so far as the colonies were concerned.
Resistance had never completely stopped among leaders like Sylla and Sans-Souci, but when news of the restoration of slavery in Guadeloupe reached Saint Domingue, the rest of the officer cadre built by Toussaint began to desert French ranks and raise rebellion: Charles Belair, Clervaux, Christophe, and finally Dessalines. The blow to the French, already drastically weakened by the fever season and further compromised by near-total dependence on “colonial troops” (that is to say the black troops of Toussaint's army), was fatal. A couple of weeks after Dessalines turned on him, Leclerc was dead of the fever.
The extravagant cruelties of his successor in command, General Donatien Rochambeau, were futile, except to inspire reprisals in kind. Rochambeau had black prisoners torn apart by dogs in the public squares, as if in a Roman amphitheater, and held a macabre ball for the femmes de couleur, at whose climax the fresh-slain corpses of their male relations were unveiled to them. If this kind of atrocity was meant to terrify the black and colored revolutionaries into submission, it had the opposite effect. In May 1803, when England declared war on France again, the position of the French in Saint Domingue became absolutely hopeless. Once it was clear that Dessalines would capture Cap Francais, Rochambeau wisely put to sea, with the last remnant of an army that had once numbered eighty thousand, and let himself be captured by the British fleet.
On January 1, 1804, the independence of Haiti was declared. Later in 1804, Dessalines became emperor of Haiti. During the same year, on Dessalines's order, and mostly under his personal supervision, the slaughter of the surviving grands blancs of the old colony began.
A French survivor, Pierre Chazotte, describes Dessalines's tour of the killing grounds at Jeremie: “When they entered the prisons, they viewed many corpses, besmeared with gore; in every apartment the floor was two inches deep, encrusted with coagulated blood; the walls were dark crimsoned with the gushes of human blood, suddenly rushing from inflicted wounds. Having viewed this slaughterhouse of human bodies, they again mounted their horses, and rode to the place on the Western road, where upwards of 1,400 corpses lay, heaped one upon another, and formed two very high mounts. The blood flowing beneath had made an issue crossing the road, and formed a bar of coagulated blood 40 feet wide. The negroes from the country would not stamp their feet on that blood; they had practised a bypath, reaching the blockhouses on the southern hill, and thereby manifested their horror at Dessalines's deeds.'7
Two hundred years later a Haitian friend told me, with a matter-of-fact solemnity, that there are certain injuries—it was understood that the abuse of slavery was definitely among them—which can be washed away only by blood.
Appalling as it may have been, Dessalines's course of action was nothing if not logical. When Toussaint had tried to incorporate the white property owners into his vision of a new reformed society founded on universal recognition of the Rights of Man, the whites had done nothing but betray him. By comparison with Toussaint, Dessalines has often been denounced as a savage. Where the conciliatory Toussaint liked to say, “Dousman ale Iwen, “(The gentlest way goes furthest), Dessalines snarled a harsher order:“Koupe tet, boule kay! “ (Cut off their heads and burn their houses!).
Severe as it was, Dessalines's consolidation of power contained an extraordinary progressive element. The massacres of 1804 were atrocious, but in fact not all the whites were slaughtered. The death sentence was mainly restricted to those associated with the oldgrand blanc slave-owning class. Others who Dessalines thought might be useful to a new Haitian society—doctors, clerks, merchants, a whole Polish regiment that had switched from the French to the Haitian side—he preserved by the simple expedient of redefining them as black. Henceforward, Haiti would be an independent black nation, and to be both white and Haitian would be a contradiction in terms. This radical measure became a matter of law in the constitution of 1805, whereby all citizens of Haiti, regardless of their pigmentation, are defined as neg. To this day, all foreigners in Haiti, regardless of their pigmentation, are called blancs.
On the road from Port-au-Prince to Leogane there is a hounfor, or Vodou temple, arranged as many of them are to confront the outside world with the powers of both the right and the left hand. As in many spiritual traditions, in Vbdou the work of the left hand is considered to be sinister, while the work of the right is beneficent and healing. The average houngan, or Vbdou priest, is obliged, for the usual reasons, to “work with both hands.”
In this particular hounfor, if one stands in the center and faces the courtyard, the road, and the world to which the road leads, one has the Chanm Ginen (chamber of the pacific mysteries of Africa) on one's right hand. The motto above the door reads Dieu qui donne et Dieu qui fait (God who gives and God who makes), a phrase which recalls Toussaints favorite proverb, Dousman ale Iwen. On the left hand is a more dangerous room with the motto Fok nan pwen, which means “There would have not to be any for me not to get some.”
The qualities invoked by these mottoes are found together— though not mixed in our common understanding of a mixture—in most Haitians, and can be sharply polarized according to the need of an occasion. Certainly they were sharply polarized from time to time, and according to need, in the personality of Toussaint Louverture. Like most Haitians, he served more than a single spirit: Bondye or Gran Met, analogous with God the Father and Creator in the Christian faith; and various Iwa imported from Africa, some beneficent, some less so. A powerful strain of charismatic Christianity, completely compatible with the pacific, benevolent Esprit Ginen, runs through his career almost from the start. In the summer of 1793 he expressed his preference of the power of love to the power of force: “we receive everyone with humanity, and brotherhood, even our most Cruel enemies, and we pardon them wholeheartedly, and it is with gentleness that we coax them back from their errors.” Nine years later in the Fort de Joux, his sense of the tragedy of his own situation moved him to evoke Christ's crown of thorns.
Toussaints Christianity, though perhaps inconstant, was not feigned. The record shows that very often he was animated, powerfully, by a Christian spirit. Still, while one considers the forbearance and moderation he mainly exercised, one must also recall that many of the atrocities Dessalines committed under Toussaint's rule were probably done with Toussaints tacit approval, if not on his secret order.
For a citizen of what we are pleased to call the First World, the apparent contradictions of Toussaint's personality can be difficult to resolve. Within Haitian culture, there are no such contradictions, but simply the actions of different spirits which may possess one's being under different circumstances and in response to vastly different needs. There is no doubt that from time to time Toussaint Louverture made room in himself for angry, vengeful spirits, as well as the more beneficent Iwa.
The name which he chose for himself, Louverture, implies that his being was ordered by Attibon Legba, the Hermes-like figure who keeps the gates and crossroads. But Legba has his sinister analogue, an inverted reflection called Malt' Kalfou—Master of Crossroads—who has a great capacity for violence and betrayal. Through Malt' Kalfou, Legba is akin to Ghede, the spirit of death, and of sex, and of the appetites. During all of his extraordinary career, Toussaint operated along the spectrum of these spirits and the attributes they represent. In their peculiarly inverted twinship, Attibon Legba and Malt' Kalfou negotiate the no-man's-land between the spirit of Fok nan pwen and that of Dieu qui donne et Dieu quifait—between Dousman ale Iwen and Koupe tet, boule kay.
According to the principles of Vodou, which has remained the actual religion of Haiti from Toussaint's time into ours (though it was not officially recognized until the 1990s, under the presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristide), no one ever really dies. The death of the body is understood as a transition of state. In contrast to the Judeo-Christian scheme of things, the souls of the Haitian dead do not depart to any distant afterworld, but remain in invisible but close proximity to the world of the living. In aggregate they form a vast spiritual reservoir, called Les Invisibles or Les Morts et les Mysteres—a well of energy available on the other side of any mirror or beneath the surface of any pool.
This near presence of the spirits of the dead foreshortens the Haitian sense of history, so that the events of the Haitian Revolution, though two hundred years in the past, may seem to have happened only yesterday. It is as if for two hundred years the Haitian Revolution has been sleeping very close to the surface, sometimes stirring to press against the fragile membrane that separates it from the world of the present day. Particular Iwa express themselves from the reservoir of Les Morts et les Mysteres, and show their power to govern the actions and the policies of the living. The Duvalier regime, which ruled Haiti from 1957 to 1986, particularly associated itself with the spirit of Jean-Jacques Dessalines—the spirit of Koupe tet, boule kay, which rules by force and by terror, which could wash away racism, but only in blood.
In 1990, a democratic revolution brought a gentler, more accommodating spirit to life in the land. In 2004, Haiti's bicentennial year, this second revolution seemed to fail.
The magical work of Vodou is often done by the creation of SL pwen, an object with a spiritual force bound up in it. In the opinion of some seers, the violence of Haitian history for the past two centuries is explained by the unfortunate fact that the pwen for the revolution was made on the element of fire. In 2004, the revolutionary pwen was supposed to be done over again, on water. If the effort succeeded, the result remains to be seen.
But Haiti's history since 1804 is scarcely more violent or more troubled than that of the world at large. In the last years of the twentieth century, a priest of Borgne said to me that what Haiti needed to find a way out of its difficulties was the spirit of Toussaint Louverture. At the opening of the twenty-first century, the United States and the rest of the world could use that spirit too.