Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (10 page)

stock. Moreau de St. Méry wrote extensively about the characteristics of

different nations of Africans. The “Sénégalais,” he wrote, were “very sober,

very clean,” and, “most of all, quiet.” The Bambara had long marks from

temple to neck, and in the islands they were often called “turkey-stealers”

or “sheep-stealers” because of the way they satisfied their taste for meat.

The Ibo were good fieldworkers but also believed in “the doctrine of the

transmigration of souls”; they often killed themselves so that their souls

would return to Africa. To dissuade others, planters sometimes cut off or

mutilated the head of an Ibo who had committed suicide, reasoning that

the Ibo would not want to appear in their homeland disfigured.13

By the late eighteenth century many plantations in Saint-Domingue had

significant concentrations of slaves from particular African regions. The

slave population of one indigo plantation in the Western Province reflected

the broader history of the slave trade: among its 92 slaves were 10 older

Arada and 29 recently purchased Kongos. On one sugar plantation in the

Southern Province there was a bewildering array of African groups: out

of the 348 slaves, 58 were Kongos, 28 Ibos, 55 Nagos, 13 Bambara, 25

Arada, 23 Mines, 13 Morriquis, and 16 Sosos; there were smaller groups of

Thiabas, Bobo, Mondongues, Senegals, Mocos, Hausa, Tacouas, and Yolofs

(Wolofs). On another sugar plantation owned by the same man, of 439

slaves 112 were Kongos, 64 Aradas, 40 Nago, 9 Bambara, and smaller num-

bers of several other groups. Within each of these groups there was cul-

tural and linguistic diversity, but African languages and customs were un-

doubtedly kept alive. Some planters placed new arrivals under the tutelage

of a slave on the plantation who came from the same homeland to facilitate

their integration into plantation life. In the process they also facilitated the maintenance of African communities in their midst. The enslaved recalled,

and sometimes called upon, their homelands. In one Vodou song recorded

in the 1950s, probably a relic from the days of slavery, a singer calls on the King of the Kongo to “look at what they are doing to me.”14

f e r m e n ta t i o n

41

The Kongos were especially dominant in the mountains, where many

coffee plantations had been founded in the second half of the eighteenth

century. In the decade before the revolution they made up at least half the

slave population on coffee plantations in the Northern and Western Prov-

inces. In some mountain regions of Saint-Domingue, languages of the

Kongo region were probably spoken as commonly as creole and French. In

the Northern Province they also accounted for 40 percent of slaves on

sugar plantations in the years before the revolution. Among these Kongo

slaves were men like Macaya and Sans-Souci, who would become leaders

of insurgent bands, and eventually of revolutionary armies, in the Northern

Province.15

On the eve of the revolution, according to Moreau, two-thirds of Saint-

Domingue’s slaves—and therefore more than half of the colony’s popula-

tion—had been born in Africa. The relationship between these African-

born slaves and the creoles was complex. Creoles had many advantages in

facing the daily struggles of slavery. They had grown up speaking creole

and had networks of kin in the colony. They generally held more of the

specialized and privileged positions on plantations and had a better chance

of emancipation. Meanwhile, slaves who had been raised in Africa had

their own cultural, political, and military experiences, their own languages

and religion. However, sharp distinctions between the groups are mislead-

ing: many creoles were only a generation away from Africa, and the Afri-

can-born who had spent much of their life in the colony became creolized

in many ways. Nevertheless, the particular life histories of members of

these two groups would shape their participation in the revolution.16

The culture of Saint-Domingue—that which shaped all its inhabitants,

whether African-born or creole, white or black—was deeply influenced by

the constant infusion of African slaves. On plantations and in towns, this

culture was inevitably present in musical traditions, language, daily habits, fashions, beliefs, and dreams. Moreau wrote of the use by African slaves in

Saint-Domingue of “little figurines made out of wood representing men

or animals,” which they called
garde-corps
—bodyguards. In the Southern Province, African slaves brought their “comrades to the cemetery” in large

crowds, with the women leading the procession, clapping, singing, and

drumming. Another observer, visiting in the late 1790s, noted that the

Kongos wore feathers in their hair, and that many had filed and sharp-

ened teeth.17

Moreau claimed that “all the Africans are polygamous in Saint-Domingue.”

42

av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d

African women married to the same man, he noted, called one another

matelots
—“sailors.” They were imitating the pirates who had settled the island the century before and formed “societies” whose members called one

another by this name. “Among these women, as among all others, there is a

kind of conspiracy against men,” Moreau opined, especially when it came

to tricking their lovers. The use of the term
matelot
among wives in a polygamous marriage is one small example of the rich process of adaptation

and transformation that took place in Saint-Domingue.18

Moreau wrote of the “African become colonial” who took on “a way of

life that can neither resemble that which they had in their place of origin or differ from it absolutely.” One of the enduring cultural legacies of the process of encounter and transformation that took place in the cauldron of the

colony is Haitian Creole. In parallel with the different creoles that devel-

oped in other colonial societies, this language emerged through the min-

gling of dialects of French with African languages. It was forged over sev-

eral generations by many speakers: early French settlers and their slaves,

free people of color, domestic and urban slaves, adult Africans brought to

plantations during the height of the sugar boom, and especially children

born into slavery in Saint-Domingue.19

African religions also put down roots in the soil of plantations, changing

in the process. They entered into dialogue with the practices of Catholi-

cism, whose saints were imbued with a new meaning by worshipers in both

Africa and the Americas. In Saint-Domingue the Arada slaves from the

Bight of Benin, who were the majority during the first decades of the eigh-

teenth century, brought the traditions of the Fon and Yoruba peoples,

which were joined by those brought by the Kongo slaves who eventually

became the island’s majority. In a world organized to the production of

plantation commodities, where slaves were meant to be laborers and noth-

ing more, religious ceremonies provided ritual solace, dance and music,

but most importantly a community that extended beyond the plantation.

They also provided an occasion for certain individuals to provide advice

and guidance. Out of the highly industrialized and regimented plantations,

then, emerged a powerful set of religious practices that celebrated and re-

flected the human struggles of those who participated in them. Religion

was, in some sense, a space of freedom in the midst of a world of bondage,

and helped lay the foundation for the revolt that ultimately brought com-

plete freedom to the slaves.20

Administrators and slave owners had long recognized the subversive po-

f e r m e n ta t i o n

43

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Engraving of a sugar plantation from the
Encyclopédie,
1751. The idealized image identifies (1) the master’s house, (2) the slave quarters, (3) the pasture, (5) the fields of sugarcane, (6) the water mill, (7) the building where the cane juice is boiled, (10) the building where the cane stalks are crushed to make the juice, (12) the building where the
pains
(“breads”) of sugar are dried, and (13) the heights where manioc, bananas, and other provisions are grown.
Courtesy of the Michigan
State University Library.

tential of the religious ceremonies of slaves. They criminalized and sought

to suppress them, though they were never entirely successful. Moreau de-

scribed in detail a “danse vaudoux” that involved the worship of a snake

that had “the knowledge of the past, the science of the present, and the

prescience of the future.” It involved dialogue between worshipers, who

wore red handkerchiefs, and two religious leaders to whom they referred

by “the pompous name of King and Queen, or the despotic master and

mistress, or the touching father and mother.” The worshipers asked these

two for favors; “the majority,” wrote Moreau, “ask for the ability to direct

the spirit of their masters.” At one point during the ceremony, the Queen

was “penetrated by the god,” and “her entire body convulsed,” and “the or-

acle spoke through her mouth.” All this was followed by the singing of “an

44

av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d

African song” and dancing. The spiritual power itself was such that some

whites, caught spying on the ceremonies and touched by one of the wor-

shipers, themselves began to dance uncontrollably, and had to pay the

Queen “to end this punishment.” “Nothing is more dangerous than this

cult of Vaudoux,” asserted Moreau. He lamented the power of the religious

leaders and the dependence of worshipers on them. Such relations of

power, presumably, were acceptable only between master and slave.21

For plantation owners and managers, the slaves were laboring machines,

cogs in a system meant to produce as much sugar or coffee as possible. “It

is in the time and strength of the negroes that the fortune of the planter resides,” wrote one contemporary commentator. The majority of slaves spent

their entire lives doing harsh and difficult labor in the fields. On sugar

plantations they were organized into several
ateliers,
or work-gangs, each under the command of a driver. The strongest slaves were assigned the

hardest agricultural tasks: digging canals, tilling the soil, planting cane, and harvesting it. A second group of children and older slaves, as well as new

arrivals from Africa who were often weak from the middle passage and

more prone to disease, took on more varied tasks, such as growing provi-

sions, fertilizing planted cane, or trimming cane plants. Field laborers

started work at five, stopped for a few hours at midday, then returned to

their labor until sundown. The grueling work of harvesting, worsened by

the danger of cutting oneself with a machete or on the sharp stalks of the

cane, usually lasted from December through July.22

Harvested stalks of cane were fed twice through a mill—usually driven

by mules, and sometimes by water—that crushed them to release their

juice. This task, usually assigned to women, was particularly dangerous. If

the slave was tired or distracted, and allowed even a finger to be pinched in the grinders as she guided a stalk into the mill, “the finger goes in, then the hand, then the arm and the whole body except the head.” Since during the

harvest season the grinding of cane was often done all night in successive

shifts of slaves, exhaustion was common. Many lost their arms, and some

died of tetanus.23

The juice from the cane was boiled in a series of vats heated with fires

made with the
bagasse
—the dejuiced sugarcane stalks—which had been

gathered in the mills by children or old women. A white
maître sucrier

(master sugarmaker) oversaw this boiling process, assisted by trained

slaves who were among the most valued and well-treated on the planta-

f e r m e n ta t i o n

45

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

Engraving of sugar processing from the
Encyclopédie,
1751. This image shows a very advanced machine for crushing the harvested cane stalks and collecting the juice, driven by a water mill. A woman is performing the dangerous job of feeding the stalks into the machine.
Courtesy of the Michigan State University Library.

tions. Their work required a great deal of care and precision. So did the

work of other “elite” slaves—the artisans who made the barrels to transport

the sugar, and those who drove the wagons that transported the cane from

the fields to the mills and also took care of the horses and mules. Another

group of relatively privileged slaves were the domestics who worked in the

master’s house. Among them were laundresses who washed clothes in

nearby streams or rivers, cooks, valets, and coachmen. They were clothed

and fed better than the field slaves and could take advantage of their posi-

tion. Some cooks collaborated with field slaves, using leftovers from the

kitchen to raise livestock. Laundresses sometimes sold the soap given to

them and washed the clothes with plants or fruit instead. Daily proximity

to the master could be an advantage. Along with drivers and artisans, do-