Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (12 page)

magical packets.” One of those he made included a crucifix, and Makandal

invoked Allah, Jesus Christ, and God when he created them.37

Like these packets, Makandal’s life and the legends that emerged from

it were the result of a potent encounter between African traditions and the

world of plantation slavery. Makandal was a slave on a plantation in the

parish of Limbé in the Northern Province, where he lost one of his arms

while working in a sugar mill. Subsequently relegated to guarding the ani-

mals on his plantation, he eventually ran away into the hills. Later legends

claimed that he gathered together a large band of fugitive slaves who at-

tacked plantations, but in fact he sowed terror primarily by using poison.

f e r m e n ta t i o n

51

He knew how to make it from harvested plants, and coordinated its use

against livestock, slaves who were deemed enemies, and masters. In order

to carry out his attacks, Makandal developed an extensive network among

the slaves of the Northern Province, including those who worked as mer-

chants traveling from plantation to plantation. Makandal was not the first

or the only slave rebel who used poison in Saint-Domingue. But the extent

of his activities and the publicity they gained helped set in motion a cycle

of paranoia and violence that continued in Saint-Domingue for decades.38

The practice of
marronage
—running away from the plantations—was

as old as slavery itself. In Saint-Domingue it took many forms. Africans

brought into the colony by slavers, refusing their condition as property,

often ran away soon after their arrival. They were prone to recapture be-

cause they lacked knowledge of the geography of the island and connec-

tions who could help them hide, although some residents did help them,

sometimes by telling them the way to Spanish Santo Domingo. Plantation

slaves sometimes left the direct supervision of the managers but remained

nearby. The organization of plantations, with cultivated land, fields for

grazing, provision grounds, and slave quarters scattered in different loca-

tions, facilitated this evasion. Some maroons stayed on the margins of their

plantations for years, eating cane from the fields or food brought to them

by friends and kin. Sometimes they also stole from provision grounds or

garden plots, impelling slaves to build or grow fences around them. Other

slaves ran away to the towns, where they could often blend into the popula-

tion of urban slaves and free-coloreds, especially if they were trained in a

craft. The towns were a preferred destination for women, who were a mi-

nority among maroons.39

Administrators did what they could to prevent such illegal mobility.

Those who left the plantations, even to go to markets on Sundays, were re-

quired to carry a pass from their masters permitting them to do so. Any

white person could stop a slave and ask him to show these documents. But,

as one commentator lamented in 1778, it was easy to counterfeit them. Es-

caped slaves took advantage of “friends who know how to write” to create

false passports, and moved about “with impunity,” coming into town to sell

and buy provisions before returning to the woods. There was also a traffic

in real passes, whose dates could be forged.40

Shorter-term absences were often tolerated by planters, who referred to

this form of escape as
petit marronage.
Individual returns might be negotiated by whites, sometimes an older woman in the planter’s family or a

52

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

neighbor, with slaves promising to return if they were spared punishment.

On absentee-owned plantations, mass
marronage
was sometimes used as a form of protest against a manager. On a plantation in the Cul-de-Sac plain

in 1744, for instance, sixty-six slaves left the plantation during the day but came back to sleep in their quarters at night, demanding the removal of

the overseer. One day the overseer killed one of the protesting slaves, a

pregnant woman, with a knife. Two months later the slaves surprised him,

carried him away, and executed him. They were condemned to death, but

the governor intervened on their behalf, recognizing that their actions

were justified by the particular brutality of their overseer. Such strikes

occurred with some regularity and often led to the negotiated return of

the slaves. Masters had a great deal of capital invested in their human

property, and it was often cheaper to negotiate a return and to replace a

white manager than to risk the loss of many slaves and the disruption of

plantation labor.41

Maroons who were repeatedly absent for several weeks or more were,

however, usually punished harshly. The Code Noir stipulated that a slave

who had been away from the plantation for more than a month was to have

one of his ears cut off and a fleur-de-lis branded on his shoulder. A slave

who ran away again for a month was to receive a second brand and have a

hamstring cut. The punishment for the third offense was death. Rather

than follow these prescriptions for mutilation, however, most masters and

managers devised other punishments that caused suffering but did not

damage their property. Maroons were usually whipped, and sometimes

their garden plots were confiscated. They might be locked up in the planta-

tion hospitals, which often doubled as prisons and were outfitted with bars

or posts used to immobilize punished slaves at night, or else in the
cachots,
small stone prisons that proliferated on plantations during the late eighteenth century. Chains might be attached to the slave’s legs, sometimes

with a ball added to make running difficult, and iron collars with spikes

placed permanently around the neck. Only a blacksmith could remove

them. Even such devices did not always keep slaves from running away

again; some maroons were caught wearing them.42

Some individuals broke permanently with the world of the plantations

by escaping to the mountains and forming or joining maroon bands. Such

bands were a presence in the colony throughout the eighteenth century,

and they left their traces on the landscape. As Moreau reported of the

eastern parts of the Northern Province, hills with names like Flambeaux

f e r m e n ta t i o n

53

(torches) or Congo “recalled the era when fugitives lived in nearly in-

accessible locations.” Many remembered “Polydor and his band, his mur-

ders, his banditry, and most of all the difficulty we had in capturing him.”

Polydor was killed in 1734, but another maroon leader named Canga

emerged in the same region in the 1770s, and after his execution there

came another named Yaya.43

These bands, who conducted raids against plantations, were a major

concern for colonial administrators. The administration maintained the

maréchaussée
to police the slaves and hunt maroon bands. In one case they opted for negotiation. In 1785 the colonial administrations of both the

Spanish and French colonies signed a treaty with a group of more than 100

maroons living in frontier region of Bahoruco. The treaty granted them

amnesty and liberty in return for their promise to pursue any new run-

aways in the area and hand them over to the authorities. Many whites

decried such agreements, believing that the only way to deal with rebel

slave communities was to destroy them. But in pursuing this policy Saint-

Domingue’s administrators were simply following the lead of those in Ja-

maica and Suriname who had signed such treaties with maroon groups in

the 1730s as a way of ending long wars and creating a buffer against contin-

uing escapes.44

During the eighteenth century the maroon communities of Saint-

Domingue maintained open, armed conflict with the plantation society

that surrounded them, claiming and defending their liberty. As a result

some consider them the precursors—and the ancestors—of those who

rose up in the slave revolt of 1791. (During the reign of François Duvalier,

a statue to the “Unknown Maroon” was erected across from the National

Palace in Port-au-Prince to celebrate these nameless rebels as the found-

ers of the nation.) Others express skepticism about the relationship be-

tween
marronage
and revolution in Saint-Domingue. The maroon com-

munities of the colony were much smaller than those in Jamaica and

Suriname, in part because many of the mountainous regions where ma-

roons might have sought refuge had been invaded by coffee plantations.

Indeed it may have been the limits on the expansion of maroon communi-

ties that propelled slave revolution, since those who wished to escape slav-

ery had to develop a direct and systemic attack against the world of the

plantations rather than seeking a refuge outside it.45

The presence of maroon communities in Saint-Domingue contributed

to the fissures in colonial society. In order to fight maroons the administra-54

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

tion ultimately turned to free people of color. In so doing they laid the

foundation for demands for inclusion that ignited the colony during the

revolution. Maroons, by successfully flouting slavery, were also an inspira-

tion and example for the enslaved, as well as for antislavery writers. The

1791 revolt, however, emerged from the heart of the thriving sugar planta-

tions of the northern plain, and the existing maroon communities were not

involved in its planning. More important for the revolt were the practices

of
marronage
on the edges of plantations, or in the towns, which had helped sustain a culture of autonomy and the networks that connected various plantations. Like religious ceremonies and Sunday gatherings, the

practice of running away laid the groundwork for an uprising that united

slaves across plantations and in so doing enabled them to smash the system

from within. Once they had risen up in 1791, however, slave insurgents

did use tactics pioneered by maroons in defending their mountain camps

against French attacks.46

Makandal was a part of the long tradition of
marronage
in the colony.

In developing his cross-plantation network of resistance, meanwhile, he

also drew on another long-standing practice: the use of poison by slaves.

Starting in the seventeenth century, colonial legislation outlawed the use of poison, in the process repressing forms of traditional healing practiced

within the slave community that whites often used as well. The reasons for

this proscription were clear enough. Poison granted power. Slaves who

used poison against whites aimed “to dominate their masters” and humili-

ate them by making them feel “a power that was hidden, but very close.”

Poison could be placed in food by the domestics who surrounded whites,

and there was often no way to detect it or to identify who had placed it

there. Commentators pointed out that since many planters put stipula-

tions in their wills granting freedom to certain slaves, there was a strong

incentive for those named slaves to accelerate their access to freedom by

killing their masters. Poison could also be used against the master’s prop-

erty, killing animals in ways that were often difficult to distinguish from

death by disease. Often it was used by slaves against other slaves. Those

who knew how to use poison could gain power and respect within the slave

community.47

It is difficult to know how extensive the use of poison by slaves actually

was. Evidence of its use comes primarily from trials conducted in a context

of rampant paranoia. Masters often imagined that poison was being used

when in fact their animals were dying of disease, and their slaves of over-

f e r m e n ta t i o n

55

work and misery. Surrounded by slaves, knowing that some might know

how to concoct poisons, and that many had plenty of motivation to use it,

many masters responded by burning suspected slaves alive without the for-

mality of a trial. In 1775, according to one doctor, every plantation had its stake. “To intimidate the other negroes,” he wrote, the masters forced

“each of them to carry a bundle of wood for the stake, and to watch the ex-

ecution.”48

It was illegal for masters to torture and kill their slaves in this way. A

few masters were in fact deported from Saint-Domingue after committing

atrocities against their slaves. For the most part, however, they acted with

impunity. In 1788 a planter name Nicholas Le Jeune tortured two female

slaves whom he suspected of having used poison against other slaves. He

burned their legs, locked them up in a cell, and threatened to kill any slave who attempted to denounce him. Nevertheless, a group of fourteen slaves

brought a complaint to the local court. White judges who went to the plan-

tation to investigate found the two women chained, their burned legs

decomposing, and one being strangled by the metal collar around her

neck. Both died soon afterward. The judges also found that a small box that

Le Jeune claimed contained poison in fact contained “nothing more than

common smoking tobacco interspersed with five bits of rat stool.” Le Jeune