Toussaint Louverture Read online

  The young Louverture originally had “a taste for the history as well as the language of his forefathers,” which he spoke with ease. His first words must have been words from the Fon language of his parents, such as tō (father) and nō (mother). Fon has a poetic way of using two root words to create a third, combining su (moon) and vi (child), for example, to create the word suvi (star): a child of the moon. Perhaps this is where Louverture got his knack for colorful metaphors, which remained a feature of his oratorical style throughout his life. Nevertheless, he quickly dropped Fon in favor of Kreyòl (also known as Haitian Creole), a mix of French and African languages that was more highly esteemed in Saint-Domingue. A slave using Kreyòl was viewed as someone who had weaned himself from his African roots and acculturated to the New World. In his later years, Louverture decided that even Kreyòl was beneath him, and he strove to learn standard French so as to gain access to the highest spheres of European society. He retained Fon until the end of his life, but he only used it when it was politically convenient to prove his credentials to the black population.7

  Louverture learned to walk outside one of the humble thatched-roof huts of the slave quarters. He was completely naked and unaware. Only later did he learn that being scantily clad and barefoot was the mark of African slaves, and that a man had to dress and shoe himself properly to affirm his status as a Caribbean-born Creole and be better treated. He learned his lesson well. At the apex of his life, his preferred outfits were the white cotton vest and the tricolor uniform of the two professions he admired the most: planter and officer of the French Army.8

  Childrearing mores in the black Caribbean, then as now, gave much leeway to very young children, especially since pregnant and nursing slaves were expected to work in the fields. Mothers had little time to spare, but absence did not preclude affection. Some slave mothers renamed themselves after their eldest sons, so it is possible that Pauline changed her identity once more to Man-Toussaint (Toussaint’s mom) after he was born. Only one thing was nonnegotiable: the respect due to elders, who were known collectively as “aunts” and “uncles” whether they were related or not. This reverence for age (and contempt for young upstarts) remained with Louverture throughout his life.9

  In the freedom of the early years, every step must have been an adventure for a small boy, even one so lightly built that he was known by the nickname of fatras bâton (sickly stick). The sharp aroma of roasted coffee in the morning, the distinctive taste of the soursop fruit, and the strange sound of the conch shell used by shepherds to summon their flock (and, much later, by rebel slaves to sound the call to arms): each would have been as puzzling as it was exhilarating. In the evening the sun dropped in a brief red burst that is the privilege of tropical latitudes, and the pitch-dark sky of a pre-electric age lit up with the myriad “children of the Moon,” whose nature had not yet been elucidated by science.10

  Back from a long day’s work, the Louverture family would have gathered around a fire whose smoke filled the hut for lack of a chimney. To pass time, elders would chat in Fon while the youngest, noted a visitor to another plantation, “lay on the floor, fed the fire with dried cow dung,” and listened attentively to tales of the old country. A slave who appeared “gloomy and taciturn” to a white observer during the day was completely different in the privacy of his home: “Now cowering over his fire, he recites, talks, gesticulates, reasons, judges, approves, or condemns, both his master and everything around him.”11

  A favorite tale of the young Louverture may have been the story of the warrior king Agassou. He was the son of a princess and a panther (from which he had inherited nails as sharp as claws) and the founder of the clan of the Agassouvi, whose members eventually migrated to the region of Allada and established the kingdom where Louverture’s father claimed to have been a king’s son. For a young boy like Louverture, it must have been exciting to know that a great warrior like Agassou was his ancestor and that panther blood ran through his veins. As an adult, however, he made no public reference to this or any other African tale, preferring to compare himself to classical European figures like the Greek slave rebel Spartacus.12

  On special nights, storytelling gave way to dances known as chicas or calendas, which incorporated African dancing styles as well as the latest quadrille from Versailles. The instruments—banjos, drums, gourds filled with pebbles—were simple, but the singing featured complex harmonics, and the dances were as spirited as they were sensual. Slaves were known to travel for hours from one plantation to another to attend a dance when they had some free time. A favorite meeting spot was La Fossette on the way to the city of Cap. Whites studiously avoided this lugubrious swamp, which made it all the more attractive to slaves looking for a good time away from the master’s presence. For a few precious hours, as one dancer challenged another, they could shake off the fatigue of their labors. Louverture probably enjoyed these dances as a child, but as a revolutionary leader he only staged them when he wanted to curry favor with his African-born followers. People often try hard to remember their childhood: Louverture did his best to forget his.

  French plantation managers concerned themselves mainly with discipline and production, leaving the slaves free to organize their private lives as they saw fit. Because slaves, and particularly African-born slaves, were so dominant demographically in Saint-Domingue (90 percent of the population, of which maybe two-thirds were African-born), the African imprint was unusually strong there. It mixed with French culture to create a Caribbean hybrid that has given Haiti its unique cultural profile.

  Although conversion to Catholicism was slavery’s main moral justification and a master’s legal duty, planters wasted little money on saving their slaves’ souls. Or their own, for that matter: the planters of Saint-Domingue were so impious that the traditional midnight Mass at Christmas had to be banned colony-wide in 1754 because parishioners had used the occasion to turn churches into “houses of debauchery.” White spirituality, when it existed, was often heretical. A manager of Haut-du-Cap was known to consult soothsayers; mystical practices, such as Mesmerism, were also popular for a while.13

  The missionary orders tasked with converting the black population of Saint-Domingue—Dominicans and Jesuits—faced a daunting challenge. There were only 20 missionaries colony-wide at the time of Louverture’s birth. As the slave population soared in the following decades, the ratio of priests to slaves diminished from 1 priest for every 315 slaves in 1685 to 1 for every 2,747 in 1752. For lack of priests, Catholic instruction often took the form of a pro-forma baptism, a yearly confession, and little else. But Louverture’s exposure to the Catholic religion was more pronounced than what most slaves encountered, as the slaves of the Bréda plantation in Haut-du-Cap were expected to join in a public prayer each day.14

  French law technically barred non-Catholics from French colonies until 1789, but the law was widely ignored, and Louverture met many Jews and Protestants in his youth. Jews (or “schismatics,” as Louverture called them) were particularly active in Cap, where they had their own cemetery. The person selling smoked herring to the Haut-du-Cap plantation was a Sephardic Jew named Aaron Sasportas. The presence of Jews in the colony was an open secret: when one governor made plans in 1765 to expel them from Saint-Domingue, per colonial law, he was reproved by his own king for harassing an economically valuable community.15

  The original Taino Amerindians of Saint-Domingue had long since vanished, but physical remnants of their culture, which turned up regularly when slaves tilled the soil, played their part in the slaves’ religious life. Popular lore held that Taino idols excavated from the ground had been created by lightning, and many blacks kept them in their homes under the belief that lightning would never strike twice in the same place. Some Caribs (another Amerindian group from the Lesser Antilles that had survived European colonization) occasionally ventured as far as Cap, and they must have been an intriguing sight for the young Louverture. Also notable was the embalmed head of a Taino that was later displayed
in the museum of the scientific society of Cap. In many ways, colonial Haiti was a land where the Enlightenment met the mystical.16

  Vodou was the product of this religious hodgepodge. A syncretic faith, it incorporated elements of ancestor and spirit worship from the Slave Coast and the Congo, along with the odd Muslim and Amerindian belief, into the Catholic framework provided by the planter class. Vodou originated in the Allada kingdom of Louverture’s father, but Louverture did not care much for a religion steeped in African spiritualism, and available evidence identifies him as a sincere and even ostentatious Catholic. He was baptized as a slave, he served as godfather on multiple occasions, and he was the only person out of the 152 slaves of Haut-du-Cap to be described as “devout” on a plantation register. Even during the Revolution, when it became politically dangerous to appear to be too friendly to the Catholic Church, he made a point of attending Mass every day and even persecuting followers of Vodou.17

  The most influential people in Toussaint Louverture’s early religious life were not makandals and houngans (sorcerers and Vodou priests), but the members of the Jesuit order who oversaw the Catholic Church in northern Saint-Domingue from 1704 to 1763. The headquarters of the Jesuit mission were a short distance away in Cap; some Jesuits even lived in the hamlet of Haut-du-Cap, right next door to the plantation on which Louverture grew up.18

  The Jesuits were controversial in Saint-Domingue because they took their role seriously and appointed a “priest of the negroes” who actively ministered to the slaves. Slaves grew more involved in their faith as a result and even began holding services on their own in the church in Cap. “One of them would do catechism or preach to the others,” a magistrate complained, and then visit nearby plantations to attract more converts. The name of this self-appointed preacher is not listed in the records, but it is tempting to identify him as Louverture, since a plantation register noted how he was “eager to catechize and proselytize.” Years later, as governor, he would quiz young people on their catechism, deliver sermons, and even celebrate Mass as if he were an ordained priest.19

  For slaves to think and pray on their own was not regarded favorably by colonial authorities; for them to dabble in exegesis also undermined the planters’ belief in their intellectual inferiority. When word got out about the independent black services and the wandering preacher in 1761, the municipal council of Cap decided to lock the town’s church during lunch hours and at night, effectively preventing slaves from gathering there unsupervised. The Jesuits were blamed for “the enormous crimes . . . committed by the slaves” and expelled from the colony altogether in 1763. Their expulsion ended Louverture’s association with the Jesuits but not with the Catholic Church: he also grew very close to the Jesuits’ successors, the Capuchins.20

  Louverture is regarded today as a hero by the people of Benin in West Africa, where his parents were born, but having African roots was considered shameful in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue. Louverture purposely left behind much of his African cultural heritage as he grew up, from the Fon language to the Vodou religion, so as to embrace the dominant French cultural model. He was no black nationalist: he was trying to fit into a colony where everything African was deemed uncivilized, and lived much of his life as a Creole and an aspiring Frenchman.

  THREE

  SLAVE

  1754

  ELIZABETH DE BRÉDA NÉE BODIN, Toussaint Louverture’s legal owner since his birth, died in 1752. Two years later her three children reached an agreement on her inheritance: they would divide her estate into three shares and draw lots. Fate put the Haut-du-Cap plantation in the hands of her son Pantaléon de Bréda Jr., who proceeded to “exchange negroes and cattle” with his sisters to even out the shares. Louverture would remain Pantaléon Jr.’s personal property for the next two decades.1

  A common trope in slave narratives is the awakening: the moment when the slave child realizes that by law he is not seen as a human being but as chattel. The Maryland slave Frederick Douglass took the full measure of his condition when he first saw a woman being whipped. “I was quite a child, but I well remember it. . . . It struck me with an awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass.” Though Louverture said no more of his awakening than he did of the rest of his childhood, it may have been on the cursed day of August 26, 1754, as family members were torn from their loved ones to even out the share of an absentee owner he barely knew, that he became fully aware of what it meant to be a slave. His father, proud son of the panther that he was, was property. So was his mother. So was he. Louverture was about ten years old at the time.2

  Though they owned him by law, the Brédas were largely a footnote in Louverture’s life. The typical colonist viewed Saint-Domingue as a place to get rich before returning to one’s true home, France, so whites only represented 5 percent of the colony’s population. So lopsided was the ratio between slaves and elite whites in rural areas that in the parish of Quartier-Morin, not far from Haut-du-Cap, there were at one time only three resident planters against 7,000 slaves. Surrounded by African-born slaves forcibly brought to Saint-Domingue and European planters longing for France, Creoles (Caribbean natives) like Louverture came to think of themselves as the only true “Americans.” “For you all whites, France is your fatherland,” explained a mixed-race Creole, “just like Africa is the blacks’ and Saint-Domingue is ours.”3

  To prevent colonists from developing an autonomist mind-set, the French government willfully limited the number of schools in Saint-Domingue. This forced colonists to send their children to France so that they could not only “suck on good French milk,” but also, potentially, serve as “hostages” guaranteeing their parents’ loyalty (Louverture would one day find his own sons in this situation). White children were accordingly a rarity in Saint-Domingue, which was probably for the best, since many of them were overindulged imps whose tantrums could cost the slaves dearly. A slave nanny who dared spank a white child was liable to have her hand cut off, and then be hanged. For his own safety, Louverture, whose primary duties were in the stables anyway, must have stayed clear of the Bréda brats.4

  As a result, Louverture barely knew the Brédas’ three children and eight grandchildren, most of whom spent the bulk of their lives in France. The oldest Bréda child, named Elizabeth after her mother, had married a naval officer at the age of fourteen (her husband is best known for captaining the ship that took Charles-Marie de La Condamine and other scientists to Peru, where La Condamine helped to prove Isaac Newton’s prediction that the Earth is not perfectly spherical). Elizabeth bore her husband six children in the 1720s and sent them to France in the 1730s to study, so Louverture never got to know them as a child.

  The second Bréda daughter, Marie-Anne, also married a naval officer (he met an inglorious end in a drunken brawl). She left for France with her two children in 1737, six years before Louverture’s estimated birth, never to return to Saint-Domingue.

  The youngest Bréda child, named Pantaléon after his father, enrolled in the navy in 1730 and spent his adult life at sea. One of his most notable accomplishments, which Louverture must have heard about countless times, involved his role in a 1745 naval battle in Môle Saint-Nicolas (a bay west of Cap) against France’s archenemy, Britain. Though Pantaléon’s career as a naval officer occasionally brought him back to the Caribbean, and he inherited the Haut-du-Cap estate in 1754, Louverture may never have met him in person.

  For slaves like Louverture, the most noteworthy aspect of the Brédas’ distant lives is that they had children and then died. Each birth and each death raised the possibility that a sale would divvy up their human assets. The 1754 split, which came after an earlier one in 1744, must have left the young Louverture shocked and bewildered. Family bonds were tentative in this precarious context.5

  Even after he inherited the Bréda plantation in Haut-du-Cap, Pantaléon de Bréda Jr. continued to serve in the navy, and he settled in France when he retired. His
slaves were no more to him than workhorses to be listed alongside mules and cattle on accounting ledgers. He only knew of his slaves through the letters sent by his legal representatives in Saint-Domingue; they knew of him primarily through a portrait that hung in the master house in Haut-du-Cap. By the time Pantaléon Jr. died in Paris in 1786, his assets were so numerous that it took a staggering twenty days for the estate lawyer to read his will. But Pantaléon Jr. left nothing for his slaves, even though it was customary for planters to bequeath cash or freedom to favored slaves. Not once in his surviving letters did he mention Louverture by name.6

  Because of this pattern of absentee ownership, which was becoming the norm in the plain of Cap during Louverture’s youth as the first generation of planters cashed in and moved out, Louverture only knew a few of the third-generation Brédas. Some of them returned to Saint-Domingue to check on their inheritance after spending their childhoods in France and stopped by the Haut-du-Cap plantation to socialize with the appointed manager. The Count of Noé (Pantaléon Jr.’s nephew), who visited the colony in 1769–1775 and 1778, was particularly well known to Louverture—so well in fact that many historians have mistakenly assumed that the count was his owner.7

  More relevant to Louverture’s personal development was the deep impression that elite whites made on him—not just the Brédas and their appointees but local celebrities like Robert d’Argout, a white officer who stopped by the Haut-du-Cap plantation in 1775 and became governor two years later. Collectively, the landed gentry and the bureaucracy were known to the slaves as the “big whites.” At once well-born, affluent, and powerful, they carried themselves with an air of innate superiority that was grating but also enthralling. Many years later, after reaching the governorship of Saint-Domingue, Louverture would do his best to imitate their mannerisms and become a “big white” in his turn. After all, did he not descend from aristocracy?