Caribbean (78 page)

“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 ship 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 ship.

When Hugues, defiant and undaunted, learned that the ship 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 assumed 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 principal 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 damned
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-class administrator; in 1794 he had with only eleven hundred troops defeated ten thousand; and in the naval wars his few little ships did capture nearly a hundred American ships 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, Eugénie 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-à-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 fashion 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.

^*1
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.

^*2
Sahn-
doh
-mong: with the last letter pronounced something between a
g
and a nasal
h
.

^*3
The young women are referring to a case whose drama swept France and the colonies. Marie Anne Charlotte Corday d’Armont was of noble 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.

I
N
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 offshore 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-Français 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-Français was bigger and more important because it fronted on the Atlantic Ocean, and was thus the first and easiest port of call for ships arriving from France. It had a spacious 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 “apron” 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 passed 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 classical dramas of Racine and Molière, 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 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 classes 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 passionately pro-French, even more passionately 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 class whose interests sometimes diverged—the
grands blancs
, that is, the big whites of the top financial and social category; and the
petits 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 mass 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.