Caribbean: a novel Part 25

His worst actions were incomprehensible, explicable neither as acts of revenge nor of sadism; his was dark behavior dredged up from the hidden abysses of the days when humans were emerging from a brutal animal existence. During one heated action when two hundred and fifty British troops were supported by three hundred French Royalists who despised Hugues, the latter demonstrated once again his military genius, for with an inferior force he attacked from three sides, overwhelming the enemy. To the British soldiers he acted with the formality of a great general, allowing them to retreat in honor, sword in hand, to their main army, but for the French Royalists he had much different plans. After throwing them all into a prison camp, along with wives and children, he trundled up his portable guillotine, erected it personally inside the gate of the camp, and started lopping off heads at a rate which stunned those who a.s.sisted in the grisly rite. Scarcely had the bleeding trunk of one man been tossed off the platform and into a growing pile than the neck of another was thrust beneath the blade.

But even though he was able at this frantic speed to behead fifty in the s.p.a.ce of an hour, he was not satisfied, so he ordered the remaining men, women and children to be fettered together in twos and threes and marched to the edge of a pit, where they were shot by untrained woodsmen firing at random. Some of the Royalists were killed outright, some were wounded, and some escaped the chance firing altogether, but at a signal from Hugues all were pitched alike into the pit, where men shoveled earth upon them, burying alive all who had survived the bullets, their screams for mercy going unheeded.

Despite the sadism, he was sincerely desirous of attaining order at home. As any good politician must, he gave the island an excellent administration, doubling its production of sugar and rum, producing food in abundance where there had been shortages before he arrived, eliminating useless and expensive jobs, and introducing an effective creole police force which served well, once most of the French-born whites had been slain.

He also had what might be called a foreign policy, for, having put his own island in order, he decided to export his revolution to others, and his small, swift boats sneaked past big British wars.h.i.+ps to invade and capture All Saints, Grenada and Tobago, in each of which he inspired slaves to take arms against their masters. Having accomplished this, he sent his secret agents throughout the Caribbean, fomenting slave rebellions against French, English and Spanish plantation owners.

His most extraordinary international adventure was a kind of declaration of war against the newly born United States, for which he had generated a savage contempt: 'Look at them. Ten years ago they were fighting the English, and if it hadn't been for French help, they'd have been crushed. Now they sell supplies to those same British who try to defeat us.' He ordered his small but capable navy to capture any American vessel that came into the Caribbean, and succeeded in taking nearly a hundred prizes. One American admiral said of him: 'He's a pest, but have you ever tried to rid yourself of those invisible gnats that attack you on warm summer nights?' and he added ruefully: 'The dirty b.a.s.t.a.r.d knows how to use what he's got.'

One of the international moves he made that produced excellent results was his encouragement of Dutch contraband s.h.i.+pping, for, as in centuries past, the Dutch were the imaginative operators in the Caribbean. Having only the smallest islands of their own, they insinuated their s.h.i.+ps into the major ones, scorning local laws against them and bringing to places like Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Cartagena the trade goods so badly needed. 'An honest Dutch pirate,' Hugues said, 'is a man of endless value.'

One night while he was haranguing a group of junior administrators, mulatto and black, he cried with great enthusiasm: 'I dream not of victory here in Guadeloupe or in British Barbados, but of the day when the kind of benevolent French rule we have introduced here will extend to all islands in the Caribbean. Not only in St.-Domingue and on Martinique, which we already have, but on Jamaica too, and Trinidad and all the Virgins. Above all, Cuba. One government, one language, all guided spiritually by our Cult of Reason.'

He returned often to explain this vision to others: 'This glorious sea-you know I've been in all parts of it-it must be ruled by one power. Spain had her opportunity and threw it away. England might have succeeded but she lost energy. Those American colonies, they'll try someday. But the people who have the best claim, the most appropriate concepts are we French. This ought to be a French sea, and it shall be.'

Basic to this idea of a French hegemony was his conviction that the French understood better than any other European nation the fundamental strength of the black man in the Caribbean: 'Look what we've accomplished already in Guadeloupe. First thing I did on landing was abolish slavery. It's a dead idea. It wastes human energy. And I've also put an end to social systems which held back mulattoes. If white men are extra intelligent and black men are extra strong, why not unite them? Raise a new race of G.o.ds. There'll be no white owner, no black slave on an island I govern.'

And he did exactly what he preached, for he told the blacks: 'You're no longer slaves. That's ended forever. But you're not wastrels either. You work or you go to jail. And I warn you, there's d.a.m.ned little food to spare for prisoners.' Through this enlightened leaders.h.i.+p he coaxed the blacks into producing more than they ever had before and without constant exhortation or beatings.

He attended also to lesser problems, erasing those petty restrictions on mulattoes and blacks which were so galling and productive of animosities. He wanted all children to enjoy a free education and he emptied the jails of prisoners who were not white. Eager to prove that former slaves could hold positions formerly held by whites only, he was constantly on the search for capable blacks, and when Solange's mother came out of jail during the dispensation, he spotted her as one with governing ability and installed her as a kind of aide, and from this position she was able to save from the guillotine several Frenchmen who had behaved themselves respectably in the treatment of their slaves.

He was a brilliant politician, no doubt about that, but midway in his commissioners.h.i.+p certain of his acts caused observers to ask: 'How sincere are the man's beliefs?' When he learned almost a year late that his friend and sponsor Robespierre had himself been guillotined, he immediately softened his revolutionary rantings, and after something called the Directory a.s.sumed control in Paris, he, without understanding a word of what it stood for, proclaimed himself a loud supporter. Watchers said: 'Look how he's stopped appointing blacks to high positions. Mark my words, any day now, he'll bring slavery back.'

Regardless of his successes or failures, Hugues would always be remembered in Guadeloupe for his traveling guillotine and wandering eye, and in the closing months of his regime the entire island watched in amus.e.m.e.nt as he became even more deeply entangled with the two young creoles, Eugenie Lanzerac and Solange Vauclain. What made his frenzied courts.h.i.+p diverting in a gruesome way was that everyone knew that since these two creoles had been in love with the murdered Paul Lanzerac, they must loathe Hugues and even pose a threat to him in their hunger for revenge.

He, too, was aware of this, but he savored the challenge of bringing them to his bed despite their bitterness, imagining himself to be like the hunch-backed Richard III of England, who found s.e.xual delight in wooing the widow of the young king whom he had just caused to be slain.

His pursuit of the two women could have been played out as one of those delightful European comedies in which a pompous official from the capital swaggers into some Italian or Spanish or French country town, casts his lecherous eye on two comely housewives, and is made a laughingstock by their superior wit. But this master plot could not play in Pointe--Pitre because the scrawny Hugues was no fat Falstaff; he was an ogre with his own guillotine.

Finding Eugenie unapproachable, since she was preoccupied with mourning her dead husband and caring for her son, he turned to Solange, who, since the destruction of her family's plantation, lived in town with her freed mother, and the more often he saw her moving about the square, the more desirable she became in his fantasies. She was the epitome of those black and mulatto people he had rescued from oblivion; she represented his vision of the future when all the Caribbean islands would exist under what he interpreted as a benevolent French leaders.h.i.+p, the tyrannical whites having been exterminated. Thus she became not only an extremely attractive young woman of beautiful face and exquisite movement, but she was also a kind of spiritual symbol of the new world that he was creating.

Of course, coincident with this growing infatuation with Solange, he was bringing to his bed at night an endless chain of whatever women he could inflict his hungry body upon, and some of the stratagems he devised to accomplish this were so wretched that they seemed ant.i.thetical to any normal concept of s.e.xual pa.s.sion. How could a man who spoke of loving a woman cause her husband to be guillotined on Tuesday and derive pleasure from forcing her into his bed at the House of Lace on Thursday? Hugues found no contradiction in such behavior, and he also applied pressure against children to bring their mothers to him and separated girls of fifteen from boys of sixteen who were striving to protect them. One observant Frenchman, an advocate of the revolution in France insofar as he understood it, wrote in a secret letter to Paris: 'In your city they speak of a Reign of Terror. Here we whisper about a Reign of Horror, for all decency seems to have fled.'

The recipient of this letter read it, snorted his disgust, and sent it back to Hugues with the notation: 'Now you have a spy in your midst,' and on the evening of its arrival in Guadeloupe, when the drumbeats rolled, the sender of the complaints was guillotined.

Hugues started his a.s.sault on Solange by promoting her black mother from a position as his aide to one which required her to work in his office, and when she was comfortably established, he made it plain that she would retain his favor only if she made it possible for him to see her daughter frequently. 'You might invite her to help you here,' he suggested, and she replied: 'Solange is no longer under my control,' and he said in tones that could not be misinterpreted: 'She'd better be.'

When Mme. Vauclain alerted her daughter, Solange said nothing; because of the barbarous conditions in Guadeloupe she was afraid to confide anything to her. Since her mother had been the recipient of the murderer's favor, she could very well have been enrolled as one of his spies, so she kept her counsel, but sometimes late at night she would slip into Eugenie's house to resume plotting with her only confidante.

'I had the strangest feeling yesterday, Eugenie. I was talking with my mother and she asked me a question ... can't remember what it was ... probing, though. And I warned myself: "Better not tell her anything. She may be one of his spies." ' She looked down at the floor, then looked furtively about, for Hugues' spies were everywhere, but she had to share her bitterness with someone, so she continued: 'That horrible man. We must go ahead.'

Eugenie said quietly, but with even greater force than Solange had shown: 'A knife, poison, a gun ... but they're difficult to smuggle in. How did the Corday woman finish her tyrant? Drowning him in a bath or stabbing him when he was there?'

Toward the end of 1797 the two women decided that since their prey was so eager to get Solange into his bed, she should mask her loathing and allow him to do so, but as Eugenie pointed out: 'Only if you can do so ... shall we say ... on some kind of permanent basis.' She hesitated: 'So you'll have opportunities to do whatever we decide.'

'Oh no!' Solange protested. 'Once I go there, I can never come here again, Eugenie. It would be too dangerous for you.' Solange then looked at this precious friend who had been so helpful in their growing up, and said softly: 'I could not bear losing you and Paul, both. This I must do by myself, but I shall do it,' and she started to go, but Eugenie reached out for her hand, and for some time the two young women stood thus in the shadows of the apothecary's house.

'Did you love him so deeply ... that you'll risk your life?' Eugenie asked, and Solange replied: 'You're willing to risk yours,' and Eugenie said sensibly: 'Of course, but we were married,' and the beautiful mulatto, even lovelier in the shadows, replied: 'We were too, in another way. And Hugues must die for the great wrong he did us both.' With this confession from the past and commitment to the future, the two creoles embraced for the last time, reconciled to the fact that if things went wrong, they might never see each other again, and as they parted in the darkness Eugenie whispered: 'Rest easy, beloved sister. If you don't succeed, I shall.'

In December 1797, Solange Vauclain moved into the House of Lace with the man she was determined to murder, and for some six weeks this grotesque love affair progressed. She dissembled her feelings so adeptly that Hugues felt the elation that any thirty-five-year-old man would feel at having won the affections of a beautiful twenty-four-year-old woman, but since he never underestimated his potential enemies, he told his spies: 'Find out about this one,' and they reported: 'She hasn't seen her friend Eugenie Lanzerac since the execution. No danger there. She is, of course, the daughter of a French Royalist, now dead. Her mother could be trustworthy or not. You're the best judge of that.'

There was more, but none of it added up to a serious suspicion of Solange except for the one irrefutable fact: 'She was, at one time, you must always remember, in love with Lanzerac, but so far as we can determine, nothing came of it.'

Lulled by such reports and a.s.sured that Solange was not seeing the Lanzerac widow, Hugues continued the affair, congratulating himself on having organized his living arrangements so amicably. One morning following a dinner party at which Solange had proved a radiant hostess, he even admitted to himself as he was shaving: She would grace any salon, that one. I get the feeling sometimes that she was made for Paris.

He spent the rest of that morning at his usual duties, including approval of the next batch of executions, then took his lunch with Solange on the balcony of his quarters, the House of Lace, overlooking the square. In the afternoon he and Solange went riding, and he was again impressed with the way she seemed to be able to do almost anything a gentlewoman should; he felt like an adoring husband as he watched her dismount, and kissed her ardently when inside the house which she had known so intimately when Paul and Eugenie occupied it.

Dusty from his ride, Hugues repaired to an upstairs room, to which former slaves brought buckets of hot water for his bath. When they were gone and he was luxuriating in the tin tub which he had brought from Paris, he heard a rustle at the door, and called out: 'Is that you, Solange?' and she came slowly, purposefully into the room, holding extended before her a long, sharp knife. With extraordinary speed and deftness, he sprang from his bath, sidestepped her attack, and knocked the blade from her hand. Screaming in terror 'Help! a.s.sa.s.sins!' he cowered in a corner.

First into the bathroom was Mme. Vauclain, Solange's mother, who understood instantly what her daughter had attempted. 'Ah! Girl!' she cried. 'Why did you fail?' And she leaped upon Hugues, trying to wrest the knife from him and finish the job. Before she could do so, guards burst into the room and pinioned both women, while Hugues continued to moan: 'They tried to kill me!' But as the women were being led away, Mme. Vauclain broke away from the guard, rushed to Solange, and embraced her: 'You did right. Don't fear, the monster will be destroyed.'

At high noon next day, his private guillotine having been moved into the lovely square, Victor Hugues watched as the African slave woman Jeanne Vauclain was led forth in chains, her face a ma.s.s of bruises from her interrogation by the guards, and dragged onto the execution platform. Thrown to her knees, she was locked into position, and the great knife fell. Moments later her exquisite daughter, slim and graceful as a young palm tree in a tropic breeze, was pushed up the three stairs to the platform and forced down till her neck was properly exposed, and again the knife fell.

This time the blade did not fall instantly, for Hugues felt he must issue a warning to his people: 'See what happens when reactionary royalists seduce and mislead our mulattoes and blacks. These women were traitors to the cause of freedom, and for that they must die.' Slowly he raised his hand to make this heroic point, held it aloft for a moment, then dropped it dramatically, and the knife roared downward in its sickening fall. Solange Vauclain, loveliest creole in her generation, was dead, and as her head rolled into the square her executioner looked across to the house of the apothecary, where Eugenie now lived, and saw that the Lanzerac widow had been watching.

With Solange out of the way, Hugues' pursuit of Eugenie became more concentrated, and although he could not reasonably expect her to move into his quarters, he did apply ingenious pressures to make her consider an alliance: 'Madame Lanzerac, we need a new apothecary in the town, so it becomes inevitable that you must leave your home to others who will put it to better use.'

When she asked: 'Where shall I live?' he replied hesitantly: 'There's always room in your old home,' but she professed not to understand what he was proposing.

Once, in extreme irritation, he reminded her: 'You remember, of course, that on the night of our arrival you were sentenced to death? Spared only by my generosity. That sentence still hangs over you.'

But still she repelled his suggestion, not masking the fact that she considered it odious. So he adopted harsher methods. One morning as she returned from her marketing at the far end of the square facing the ocean, she was greeted by a screaming woman: 'Eugenie! They've stolen your boy!' and when she rushed to the room in which she had left him, she saw that he was gone.

In the anguished days that followed she received a bombardment of bewildering rumors, orchestrated by Hugues but never voiced by him, for he intended to step forward later as her savior: 'The boy Jean-Baptiste was found dead!' and 'The little Lanzerac boy was found in a marketplace near Ba.s.se-Terre.' In this cruel broth he would let Eugenie stew until she became, in his words, 'ready for my closer attention.'

No longer having any woman friend to give her support, and with all the young Royalist men who might otherwise have helped executed, Eugenie had, in her almost paralyzing grief, no one to whom she could turn; even the priests who would have aided her had been guillotined in those first terrible days. She could, of course, do what many young women like her had done, seek a.s.sistance from generous-hearted slave women who now possessed power, but Mme. Vauclain was dead and Eugenie knew no one like her, so she huddled alone in her empty house and wondered when she would be dispossessed and forced to accept Hugues' hospitality.

The closer this eventuality came, the more certain she was that within a week of such a move, she would murder this dictator, even if she herself was guillotined the next morning: He must not be allowed to live, wallowing in his crimes, and this curious phrase became her s.h.i.+bboleth, the rubric that defined her. She would allow him to possess her over the dead bodies of her husband and son, but in achieving this triumph, he would be signing his death warrant. She, unlike Solange, would not let him see her coming at him with a knife. She would murder him as he lay beside her in his sleep.

But Hugues, more or less guessing her thoughts, confused the situation by sharing with her astonis.h.i.+ng news: 'You know, Eugenie,' he said in the street one day, 'if you shared my quarters, there might be some way of finding your son.'

She did not raise her voice or charge him with being an inhuman monster for using a child, supposed to be dead, in this way, for she did not wish anyone to see her anger and remind Hugues of the perilous game he was playing. Instead, she asked quietly: 'Commissioner, are you intimating that my son is alive?' and he said, with a carefully composed smile: 'What I meant was, that under proper circ.u.mstances I could direct my men to search more closely.'

As he left her to consider this persuasive offer, she remained in the square, staring after him as he entered her House of Lace, and each item of his ugly appearance she found more repulsive than the others: That grisly hair. That slouching walk. Those ridiculous pipestem legs, the shoes that look too big. Those long arms like in the pictures of monkeys, and the hands covered with blood. Comparing him with her memories of Paul, she felt faint to think that one so ill-favored should live and that Paul should be dead.

She was more determined than ever that Hugues must die, but the possibility that her son might be alive, and recoverable, forestalled her, and for some days she wandered Point--Pitre trying to resolve her dilemma. There was no solution. If Jean-Baptiste was alive, she too must stay alive to rear him, which meant that she must tolerate the only man who could restore her son, the unspeakable Hugues.

Resigning herself to the prospect of a life with Hugues that must end in murder, she went to him voluntarily: 'Commissioner, I live only for my son. If your men can find him ...'

'They already have,' Hugues said, his hooded eyes sparkling with desire, and from an inner room a black maid appeared with Jean-Baptiste, four years old and each day a closer replica of his father. With a cry of 'Maman!' he rushed into her arms, and Hugues smiled benevolently at the sight of this reconciliation of a boy who might one day be his adopted son and the mother who would soon be his mistress. Then, as she prepared to take Jean-Baptiste to her home across the square, he warned her: 'Remember, Mme. Lanzerac, you are still under sentence of death.'

Miraculously, an unexpected event occurred the next day which spared her from Hugues and removed the necessity for her to commit murder; a s.h.i.+p arrived from France with exciting news: 'Napoleon's won victory after victory, and he's now heading for Egypt.' A much less radical government was in control and its more sober members felt disgusted with Hugues, whom they were replacing with a new commissioner carrying surprising orders: 'Send Hugues back to Paris under close arrest.' By nightfall he was thrown out of his quarters and into a small cabin aboard the newly arrived s.h.i.+p.

When Hugues, defiant and undaunted, learned that the s.h.i.+p would require seven days to unload its cargo and take on the sugar and foodstuffs that Paris required, he demanded: 'Give me pen and paper.' And when his captors complied, for they knew him to be an important official, he sat in his cabin scratching unceasingly with his pen and composing a masterpiece. It ran to sixty pages and depicted the many miracles of good government he alone had engineered. He spoke glowingly of his courage in battle, of the economic revolution he had inspired, of the many victories his aggressive little fleet had won against Britain and the United States, of his freeing of slaves, and especially of his overall probity and unmatched insight into the problems of the Caribbean.

His self-written panegyric was so mesmerizing that it would have befitted a Pericles or a Charlemagne, and it achieved its purpose, for when the very officials who had ordered his arrest read it, they cried: 'This Hugues must be a genius!' and forthwith they appointed him governor of another colony, from which he wrote similar reports of his achievements in his new post.

He did not remain there long, for when Napoleon a.s.sumed power, and said in effect: 'No more of this nonsense about outlawing slavery, it's restored,' Hugues was brought back to Paris, where he became a princ.i.p.al spokesman for the new order, and was often heard giving harsh instructions to young officers headed for the colonies: 'You must be careful to keep those d.a.m.ned noirs in their place. They're slaves, and don't you let them forget it.'

His most unbelievable switch, however, came in 1816, after the coronation of a new king to replace Napoleon, for he now revealed that he had always been an ardent Royalist, ignoring the fact that on Guadeloupe some years earlier he had beheaded more than a thousand such people without giving one of them a chance to defend himself.

He was allowed to make this amazing volte-face for several reasons: he really was a first-cla.s.s administrator; in 1794 he had with only eleven hundred troops defeated ten thousand; and in the naval wars his few little s.h.i.+ps did capture nearly a hundred American s.h.i.+ps and an equal number of British. It is recorded that even in his sixties he was pursuing and often catching beautiful women, and he died in bed ... covered with honors.

Meanwhile, Eugenie Lanzerac, shed of her oppressor and reunited with her son, became one of the most desirable young creole widows in the French islands, and more than a few officers, refugees from the terrors of Paris, sought her hand, for they were hungry for the tranquillity of Guadeloupe. She finally married a young fellow from the Loire Valley, scion of one of the castled families in that region, and with him worked to restore the quiet beauty of Point--Pitre.

After they had been married for some months, she sought the stonecutter who had made the infamous marker for the Dundas gravesite, and gave him a strange commission: 'Find me a small, stout stone and fas.h.i.+on it as if it were two headstones in one.' When this was done she asked him to inscribe on it the first names of the two she had loved: PAUL ET SOLANGE, and this she embedded in the wall of her House of Lace, where it remained for many decades after her death.

* Creole has many different definitions. In Russian Alaska it signified a child born of a white Russian father and an Aleut woman, and it was not pejorative. In Louisiana and other American areas which heard the word, it was often used to denote a person born of a white French father and a black woman, and was pejorative. In the English-speaking islands it was used to imply 'a touch of the old tarbrush, doncha know?' but, as one expert explained: 'Mulatto is the word we use when referring to that unfortunate condition.' In the French islands it meant simply 'any locally born persons or thing of whatever color or derivation,' and the name bore no adverse connotation. There could, for example, be creole horses or cows.

Sahn-doh-mong: with the last letter p.r.o.nounced something between a g and a nasal h.

The young women are referring to a case whose drama swept France and the colonies. Marie Anne Charlotte Corday d'Armont was of n.o.ble lineage but supportive of the more rational aspects of the Revolution. Appalled by the excesses of Jean Paul Marat, she posed as a news reporter, interviewed him while he was in his bath, gave him a list of suspected Royalists, and when he said: 'We'll guillotine them all,' she stabbed him to death and went herself to the guillotine.

IN 1789 the world's most profitable, and in many ways the most beautiful, colony was that portion of Columbus' grand island of Hispaniola owned by France. The colony formed the western third of the island-the eastern two-thirds having remained in Spain's hands-and was called St.-Domingue.

Its terrain was mountainous, covered with a growth of marvelous tropical trees, and watered by many tumbling streams. Its yearly rainfall was precisely that required for the growing of sugarcane, coffee and a host of luscious tropical fruits not known in Europe, especially succulent mangoes and plantain, a kind of banana eaten fried. Interspersed among the low mountains were numerous flat areas ideal for plantations, of which it had well over a thousand, each one of them capable of earning its lucky owner a fortune.

How did this colony, once so firmly in the grasp of Spain, happen now to be French? Its history fit the old saying: 'There's nothing so permanent as a temporary arrangement.' In the preceding century when the buccaneers of Henry Morgan's day flourished on the little offsh.o.r.e island of Tortuga, French pirates tended to come and go, using the stronghold for temporary advantage, and some of them came and stayed. The informal rulers of Tortuga and the pig-hunting grounds on the west coast of Hispaniola were invariably French, with the result that in 1697 when a comprehensive treaty among European nations was being formalized, France said: 'Since our people already occupy the western coastline of Hispaniola, why not cede it to us?' and it was done. Persistent French pirates had accidentally won their homeland a treasure chest.

St.-Domingue, which would soon be surrendering its French name for the old Indian Haiti, produced so much wealth that one planter said before heading back to Paris with his fortune: 'You plant sugarcane and the soil turns to gold.' The colony's two main settlements-Cap-Franais in the north, Port-au-Prince in the south-each a small city, gave proof of this fact with the profligate way they displayed their wealth.

Of the two, Cap-Franais was bigger and more important because it fronted on the Atlantic Ocean, and was thus the first and easiest port of call for s.h.i.+ps arriving from France. It had a s.p.a.cious anchorage, a splendid waterfront and a population of some twenty thousand. Its glory was its huge theater, seating more than fifteen hundred patrons, with an 'ap.r.o.n' stage that brought the actors well out into the middle of the audience. Since these players had to come all the way from France, it was good business to hold them in the colony for a three- or four-year stint, and this was practicable because there was an even finer theater in Port-au-Prince, seating seven hundred, plus half a dozen rural theaters in the smaller towns in between. Thus the colony could easily support two or three full-sized companies, and Paris actors pa.s.sed the word among their colleagues: 'St.-Domingue is a fine experience.'

The theaters offered four kinds of entertainment: current popular dramas, musical plays, a kind of vaudeville and, from time to time, the great cla.s.sical dramas of Racine and Moliere, so that even a child growing up in a small country town would have an opportunity of seeing plays of high quality in his local theater.

At Le Cap, as it was popularly called, there were scores of shops offering about what one would find in similar establishments in French towns like Nantes or Bordeaux-fine leather goods, silverware, the latest modes in women's and men's wear-and several really excellent French patisseries. There were skilled doctors, eloquent lawyers, horse-drawn cabs and patrolling police. Establishments for boys offered a superficial education at best, since any young fellow of promise was whisked off to France for his schooling, but since most of these lads returned to St.-Domingue, the cultural level of the colony was high. There were no schools for girls, nor any record of a girl's having been sent to the metropolitan for her education, but there were books and magazines for ladies, so that literacy among the French residents was universal and the quality of conversation high. Whatever happened in Paris was soon known at Le Cap, although in crossing the Atlantic, it tended to adopt a strong conservative coloring.

Glorious as the colony could be-and on fine days, which were plentiful throughout most of the year, the breezes at evening were pleasant, the scenery majestic and the food an exotic mix of the best French cuisine and Caribbean opulence-it could not have produced the endless wealth it did without human beings who were equal to the task of utilizing this richness. And in this respect St.-Domingue was both blessed and cursed.

The blessing was that some deity seemed to have said: 'I've given the colony beauty and riches, now I'll populate it with people to match,' and as a consequence the beautiful land was occupied by some of the ablest citizens in the Caribbean. The French settlers were educated, hardworking and of strong fiber, the blacks were positively the best brought out of Africa; so the colony should have been a stable area destined for greatness.

Its curse was that three cla.s.ses of its citizens hated one another, and the wild upheavals of twenty years-1789 through 1809-not only failed to weld these groups into a reasonable whole; they divided them so thoroughly that tragedy became inevitable. The top group was clearly defined: landowners, skilled professionals and fonctionnaires sent out from Paris to govern the place, and they were invariably white, rich and in control of everything. They owned the plantations, operated the expensive shops and contributed funds for the theater so as to monopolize the best seats. They tended to be pa.s.sionately pro-French, even more pa.s.sionately conservative and indifferently Catholic; religion did not play a major role in St.-Domingue, but the traditional blanc would have looked askance at a Protestant who tried to start a business or build a home at Le Cap.

There were two divisions in this cla.s.s whose interests sometimes diverged-the grands blancs, that is, the big whites of the top financial and social category; and the pet.i.ts blancs, the little whites, some of whom amounted to very little indeed. But in the period starting in 1789 they were more or less united.

At the bottom of the groups, and so far down that from the position occupied by the whites they were well-nigh invisible, were the noirs-the blacks, the slaves. Born for the most part in Africa, they were illiterate, untrained in plantation life and rigidly excluded from Christianity by their owners, who feared that the teachings of Jesus might lead to a demand for freedom. They retained many African ways, adhered to religions rooted in the Dark Continent, and adjusted to the heat, food and working conditions in St.-Domingue with an adaptability that was amazing. They contained in their seemingly amorphous ma.s.s just about the same proportion of potential artists, fine singers, philosophers, religious and political leaders as any other group of people in the world, and certainly, as we shall see, about the same percentage of military leaders as the whites in their colony. But because they lacked education and opportunity, their skills remained hidden until disruptions of one kind or another revealed them. Then the blacks of St.-Domingue were to display a capacity that astounded the world.

Caught in the middle between the two extremely powerful grinding stones of white plantation owner and black slave writhed a considerable ma.s.s of citizens who were neither white nor black. Their racially mixed brothers and sisters appeared on all Caribbean islands and always faced the same impediments, promises, hopes and crus.h.i.+ng disadvantages; in those other colonies they might be called mulattoes, coloreds, half-breeds, half-castes, creoles, criollos or b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, but in St.-Domingue all those terms were avoided, especially mulatto, which was deemed to have a pejorative ring. Here they were called gens de couleur, or, in English, people of color, or, more simply, free-coloreds.

Despised by whites, who saw them as parvenus striving to climb up to a level to which they were not ent.i.tled, and hated by blacks, who saw them as const.i.tuting a middle layer which would forever prevent the slaves from attaining power, the free-colored were spurned from above and below, and their history in St.-Domingue paralleled the experience of similar mestizo groups in the British Caribbean, in India and in South Africa: They had no real home, no ally whom they could trust, and no ascertainable future. But although there were these similarities to the situation in other world colonies, their role in St.-Domingue was especially frustrating because again and again they would come close to reaching a solution, only to find themselves betrayed and hunted down like animals.

In 1789 the whites in the colony numbered about 40,000, free-coloreds about 22,000, black slaves not less than 450,000, and because the death rate among the overworked and underfed blacks was so appallingly high, some 40,000 replacement slaves had to be imported each year from Africa, and this lucrative trade was in the hands of great slaving companies situated in France's Atlantic seaports like La Roch.e.l.le, Bordeaux and, preeminently, Nantes.

In 1770, when it became clear to commercial observers that the English colonies in North America must sooner or later fall into either trouble or rebellion, the great s.h.i.+pping house of Espivent in the French seaport of Nantes saw that its traditional business of running slaves from Africa to the New World would have to be increased dramatically in the frenzied time before war erupted. The major branch of the family, enn.o.bled centuries before, decided to place in command of its nine slave s.h.i.+ps the most daring captains available, and to tempt them with large bonuses to move their s.h.i.+ps to Virginia and Carolina more rapidly than before in order to maximize their profits while slaving was still possible.

Finding only eight acceptable captains, they looked among the many members of the family who worked for them, and spotted Jerome Espivent, twenty-nine and a man of character who had served on many family s.h.i.+ps. He knew the slave coast of Africa, the slave markets in Carolina and the Caribbean, and could be trusted to submit honest reports of his dealings. a.s.signing him to one of their larger s.h.i.+ps, his n.o.ble relatives told him: 'Make our fortune and yours,' and he had applied himself so a.s.siduously that by the time the American rebellion broke out in 1776, he had ama.s.sed considerable wealth and a rare knowledge of the Caribbean. In 1780, as the war was waning, and running the English blockades no longer paid huge dividends, Espivent decided to quit Nantes, where he would always be under the thumb of the n.o.ble wing of his large family, and settle in the Caribbean. Naturally, he thought first of the French islands, Martinique in particular, for it was a place of high culture and rich social life, but he also considered the more plebeian Guadeloupe. Yet in the end he selected a fine hillside in the town of Cap-Franais, for in most criteria it far excelled locations elsewhere.

On this hill he built his residence, a brutish kind of Rhineland stone fortress on the outside, a delicate valley chteau with s.p.a.cious rooms and expensive decorations on the inside. It commanded views of both the Atlantic, so that he could see the arrival of s.h.i.+ps from France sooner than anyone else, and of the town which lay obedient at its feet. Here Jerome Espivent ruled as the social and political dictator of the seaport, the epitome of French influence in the Caribbean.

He was now forty-eight, a tall, imperial-looking man, with graying hair, a tightly trimmed mustache and a finely pointed Vand.y.k.e goatee. Despite the tropic heat, he favored the flowing capes worn by n.o.ble Frenchmen in the past century, so he asked a local shopkeeper to import from India cloths of the sheerest weight, from which seamstresses produced elfin-thin capes in light blue or s.h.i.+mmering black, and when he appeared at the theater in one of these, his c.o.c.kaded hat at an angle, he seemed to be telling the citizens of Le Cap that he bespoke the ancient glory of France.

He was a Royalist, an admirer of the n.o.bility of which he was a collateral part, and a shrewd investor of his savings, for it seemed that whatever he touched prospered beyond expectations. No longer commanding a s.h.i.+p of his own, he served as a kind of sh.o.r.e agent for those operated by other men, and year after year he appeared to make more profits from these s.h.i.+ps than did their owners. He also bought coa.r.s.e muscovado sugar from other plantations which lacked the facilities his had and refined it himself, importing for that purpose big s.h.i.+pments of clay from Barbados. He was a very rich man, but he was no miser, for he helped support the theater, sent bright lads to France for their education even though they were not his sons, and was available for all contingencies, for he felt that Frenchmen of station were obligated to maintain a public presence.

He had one curious concern that had started as a hobby but which had grown, as hobbies will, into an obsession. Believing as he did that G.o.d had put white blood into the world to help Him save it from barbarism, he had become fascinated by what he called 'the contamination of the black,' and this led to a conviction that dominated his life: Even one drop of black blood mixed with white can be visibly detected through the seventh generation. Since this meant that a child in the seventh generation would have had 128 ancestors, he had devised a table which showed every possible combination from 128 pure white = o black, to the disgraceful end of the spectrum, o white = 128 black.

And he had codified in orderly form the popular names for these mixes, as he was fond of explaining to anyone who would listen: 'Suppose a white man with totally clean blood marries a black woman right out of the African jungle with dirty blood. Their child is a mulatto, half and half. Now, never again does one of the men in our example marry another black, always pure white. Next generation, three parts white, one black, and we call him a quadroon. He marries pure white, his child is an octaroon-seven clean, one dirty. Next generation, fifteen white, one black is a mameluke.'

Of course, the actual mixing was more confused than in his ideal example, and some of the names of the 128 possible mixes were fascinating: a child one part white, seven black was a sacatra; three parts white, five colored was a marabou; but he considered one of the most exciting mixes to be the griffe, one white, three colored: 'Those girls simply do not know when to stop.' His incredible system reached the number 8,192, representing the ancestors a human being would have if one counted back to the thirteenth generation: 'Only in that generation can a man win his way back to the respectability of being white from which his ancestor departed in shame.' He also warned young men: 'Counting an average of twenty-two years to a generation, it will require your descendants two hundred and eighty-six years to correct your dreadful mistake if you marry a woman with black blood. The moral? When it comes time to marry, stay away from the free-coloreds.'

With such implacable views it was clear that Espivent would have strong feelings about the non-whites in his colony. He had to do business with them, have his beard trimmed by them, order cakes from their bakeries, and employ them to serve as overseers when men from France were not available. Wherever he moved in St.-Domingue he ran into them, bright young men with bright skins and fine teeth 'trying always to be better than they are.' But the more he saw of them, the more he despised them, for he was sure he could detect in what he called their s.h.i.+fty eyes signs of the revenge they would one day seek. Everything about them infuriated him: 'Mon Dieu, some of them speak better French than our own children. Did you know that Premord, that speechifying menace over in the tailor's shop has had the nerve to send his two sons to Paris for their education? These coloreds buy books, they fill the theaters, they attend our churches, they parade their pretty daughters before our sons and hope to trap them. They're worse than mosquitoes, the curse of our colony.'

Sometimes he would walk the streets of Le Cap cataloguing each man or woman of color, reciting to himself: That one has three-quarters black blood, that one only one-eighth, that pretty one'll be trying to pa.s.s for white one of these days, but the stain will always be there and sooner or later it'll betray her. The sight of an exquisite free-colored girl gave him pain, not pleasure, for he always visualized her trapping some innocent soldier just out from France, forcing him to marry her, and then slipping into the metropolitan with her ineradicable black blood to contaminate the homeland. He frequently felt that the colony and the homeland were doomed, but he stayed on in St.-Domingue because he had a s.p.a.cious, cool chteau in town and a grand plantation in the country. Espivent's racial att.i.tudes were ant.i.thetical to those of most of his fellow countrymen, and sometimes he was accused of being worse than the English, but he never gave an inch in his dogma of extremism. In fact, he reveled in it.

Jerome Espivent called his huge plantation Colibri, or Hummingbird, and to cultivate its rich acreage he utilized some three hundred slaves-'the best in the Caribbean,' he boasted to his fellow planters. He could claim this because during the years that he supervised his slave s.h.i.+p and those of his family, he invariably anch.o.r.ed each new arrival from Africa first off Cap-Franais, where he inspected the newcomers, selecting for his plantation the strongest and those who looked the most intelligent. The rejects he s.h.i.+pped on to the American colonies, where such high standards could not be enforced.

But his best slave, Cesar, had reached him not in his own s.h.i.+ps but by a most curious route. When the blacks on the Danish island of St. John rebelled in 1733, most of the rebels were executed in terrible ways, but one of the leaders of the revolt, a slave named Vavak, Cesar's father, had fled the island in a small boat, accompanied by his woman. In furtive rowing, they skirted the larger Danish island of St. Thomas, where certain death awaited any fugitive black, and made their way to the north coast of Puerto Rico, where they hid ash.o.r.e for seven days before proceeding in their same small rowboat to the eastern end of the big island of Hispaniola. There they fell into the hands of a Spanish plantation owner who, predictably, enslaved them again, but they managed to flee to the French side, where they were once more thrown into slavery on a plantation just north of Port-au-Prince.

When, in 1780, Espivent began stocking Colibri, he heard about a slave for sale-whose owner was going bankrupt-who was considered 'one of the finest slaves in these islands, a bright, hardworking fellow, south of here.' When he went down to inspect, he found a young married man of twenty-four, named Vavak, after his father. It required only a few minutes for Espivent to decide that although this man was rather short, he was the one he wanted to serve as lead slave on his plantation at the north end of the colony. Having bought him at a bargain price, he listened when Vavak begged him in good French to buy his wife too. 'That would make sense,' Espivent said. 'Man works better with his woman at hand to guide and care for him,' and the three started back to Colibri, but on the way Espivent said: 'Vavak's not a proper French name.' After reflecting for a moment, he snapped his fingers and cried: 'Vaval! First name Cesar, your woman's name Marie.'

Cesar and Marie first saw the great plantation that would be their home on a stormy afternoon in the spring of 1780, and as they trudged behind their new master on his spirited horse, he suddenly reined in, ordered them to halt, and pointed to a magnificent landscape ahead: 'The stone house on the right, that hill to the west, the lands sloping down toward the ocean that hides behind that rise, all mine. All yours to tend.'

Cesar's first reaction to the plantation was professional delight in the fact that it looked as if sugarcane would grow easily, then pleasure in seeing it was in fine condition, with roads that had been leveled, small houses with roofs, and land that had been properly tilled. But before he could comment, Espivent rose in his stirrups and pointed to a distant hilltop which he could see but the slaves could not: 'That's Chteau Espivent, my home. Sometimes you'll work there, when the hedges need tending.' With that, the plantation owner spurred his horse and rode toward the collection of huts in which his new slaves would make their home.

In the years that followed, Cesar did not see his owner regularly, for Espivent did not come often to his plantation, and when he did, it was to examine the cane fields, not the slaves. When riding inspection through his valuable hectares he could stare imperially down avenues of cane and never see his three hundred slaves. He did not ignore them; he simply looked past them as he did past the trees that edged the fields.

He was reasonably kind to the slaves, but he did subscribe to the theory that it was most profitable to treat them like animals-one pair of pants, one s.h.i.+rt, boughs on the ground for a bed, the cheapest food-and work them to death, replacing them with new bodies bought at a bargain from his family's s.h.i.+ps. While they lived he did not abuse them, and whenever he found one of his overseers doing so, he discharged him: 'Treat your slaves decently and they not only live longer, but they also work better while they do live.' An Espivent slave who started healthy survived about nine years, and since he paid for his cost in five years, he represented a profitable investment.

Since it was impossible for Cesar to imagine any better system of slavery than the one he knew, he accepted the belief voiced so often at Colibri: 'Ours the best plantation. I been others where they whip. n.o.body as good as Monsieur Espivent.' Now as the fateful year 1789 edged toward the middle of summer, tremendous events were convulsing metropolitan France, but the slaves of St.-Domingue were prevented from learning about them. Fearful lest black yearnings for freedom be ignited into conflagrations that could not be controlled, Espivent encouraged the grands blancs in a campaign to keep all news from France away from the slaves, and he succeeded.

If the black Vavals knew nothing of the revolutionary fires that swept France in the tumultuous days following the attack on the Bastille, the free-colored Xavier Premord and his wife, Julie, certainly did, for their two sons in France sent them detailed letters about the changes then under way. 'Things won't be the same after this,' Xavier told his wife, but the improvements he sought were superficial compared to the root-and-branch alterations Julie dreamed of. 'It's all got to be different,' she said repeatedly as news filtered in of peasant uprisings in the French countryside, mob action in Paris and proposed new forms of government.

Xavier's reaction to this physical and intellectual violence was: 'Now we free-coloreds will get the vote and gain some respect in Cap-Franais,' but his wife aspired to a complete modification in social patterns: 'No more will we coloreds be the despised and trod upon,' and she was determined that Espivent in his prosperous chteau cease serving as arbiter of the political and social life of the northern community. Listening to Xavier, one could visualize a slow but steady transition to new patterns of life, but if one attended to what Julie was saying, one heard echoes of revolution.

Although he detested doing so, when Espivent wanted choice material from India for a new cape, he had to buy it from Xavier Premord's shop near the theater, and when he needed a new jacket and trousers of a special cut he also had to go there, as did the other dandies of Le Cap, for Premord had not only arranged with weavers of Bordeaux and Nantes to use him as their exclusive agents for the importation of fine wool and sheerest cotton, but he had also made arrangements with the best local seamstresses and tailors to work only for him. Any Frenchman in Le Cap who wanted to be really well dressed had to do business with Premord, who was usually dressed more modishly than any of them.

Xavier and his wife were prime examples of why the grands blancs feared the free-coloreds. He was a tall, handsome man in his thirties, obviously intelligent and prudent in the management of his business; while she was the type of colored woman against whom Espivent railed-slim, attractive and with an amber skin that enshrined her in a golden glow. In addition to this visible benediction from nature, she was a sharp-minded, canny businesswoman with those instincts of caution and profit which seemed to come easily to Frenchwomen of the middle cla.s.s.

She did not help her husband in his shop; she a.s.sumed responsibility for the small plantation inherited from her father near Meduc, a village opposite the pirate island of Tortuga. In fact, it was to the land now occupied by this plantation that the buccaneers Ned Pennyfeather and his uncle Will Tatum had come hunting wild boar more than a century ago.