Caribbean (87 page)

When the funeral ship reached France, Leclerc was buried with the honors he had won as a courageous fighting man, and Napoleon paid him respect, but the latter’s attention was on other matters, for when he realized that he might lose St.-Domingue, he quickly disposed
of the other prospering colony he held in Louisiana, selling it at a shockingly low price to President Jefferson of the new American Republic, for in his opinion, probably correct, Louisiana without St.-Domingue as a way station to support it would be indefensible.

He also attended to his rambunctious sister, finding her with amazing celerity an Italian nobleman, a member of the great Borghese family, as her second husband. As a gesture of appreciation, young Borghese sold Napoleon for pennies the vast Borghese collection of art and supervised its removal to Paris. To reciprocate, Napoleon made Pauline a duchess, but this only served to spur her bedroom activities.

With Leclerc gone and the bulldog Vaval still at large, command of the French troops in St.-Domingue fell into the hands of the son of an illustrious general who had helped the American colonies win their independence. Donatien Rochambeau turned out to be one of the horrors of the Caribbean, known for his disgraceful behavior and his Nero-like propensities.

To strike terror into the hearts of Vaval’s black remnants still opposing the French, he imported from Cuba a large number of savage dogs specially trained to attack Negroes, introducing the animals at a gala evening performance attended by eager whites. Three black men, stripped to the waist, were brought into an enclosed space, and while they huddled together, unaware of what was about to happen, hatches were thrown open and the dogs leaped into the arena. But they were quickly greeted by a chorus of booing, for the dogs merely sniffed at the blacks, circled them, and withdrew to fight among themselves.

Rochambeau, infuriated by the cries of derision, shouted to his soldiers: “Draw some blood. That’ll get them started,” and men with bayonets went out, protecting themselves from the dogs who wanted to attack them and not the blacks, and jabbed at the bellies of the three blacks until blood spurted, whereupon the dogs leaped at the men, tore them apart, and devoured them. The audience applauded.

Like Leclerc before him, Rochambeau was domiciled at Espivent’s château, where nightly he was encouraged by the owner to continue his assaults on blacks and free-coloreds: “I must show you my studies, General. How one drop of black blood contaminates a family through thirteen generations, 8,192 descendants. So anything
you can do to eliminate blacks and even part-blacks is commendable,” and these two patriots, representing not more than 40,000 whites among nearly 500,000 blacks, seriously believed that through terrorism they could control the blacks and force them back into slavery: “Finest thing Napoleon’s done so far, General, is the reintroduction of slavery, but we may have to kill off all those who knew freedom under Toussaint and that infamous Vaval. They won’t surrender, so don’t hold back.”

Espivent applauded when his new friend disciplined a fractious black brigade in a manner that General Leclerc could not have approved. The hundred or so black would-be mutineers were marched to the public square, surrounded by French soldiers with rifles at the ready, and forced to watch as their wives were then brought into the square and executed in various ways, one by one. Then the guns were turned on the men, and all were slain.

Espivent himself participated in a general elimination of any Cap-Français blacks who were reported by white informants as “being so badly infected with the disease of freedom that they will never again make good slaves.” He set up an open-air office on the docks and from it directed some eight thousand blacks to board ships that would, he promised, “take you to freedom in Cuba.” When the ships were loaded, one by one, they sailed about a mile out into the bay, where sailors armed with guns and swords killed the blacks, pitching their dead bodies into the sea at such a rate that the nearby shores were lined with decomposing corpses. Espivent remedied this unfortunate development by instructing the captains: “Sail your ships farther so the currents will carry the bodies out to sea.”

Espivent did not personally participate in one of the more ingenious assaults on blacks, but he did provide a slaving ship for the experiment and supervised the engineering details: belowdecks a small furnace was erected in which wet sulfur could be burned, and the prodigious amount of smoke it produced was then conveyed by pipes into a lower hold where the blacks were crammed. One potful of burning sulfur gave off enough gas to suffocate sixty blacks, killing them without the waste of bullets or the construction of gallows.

But these atrocities, and there were others, gained Rochambeau nothing, for whenever a new one was reported to General Vaval in the mountains, he listened, did not interrupt, bowed his head and clenched his fists till the nails bit into his palms—and dedicated himself even more furiously than before to a single task: “We shall evict
every Frenchman from this colony. There can be no negotiation, no truce.” Ten years before, he had not even known words like
evict
and
negotiation
, but now he was using them fluently to help build a new nation.

Each night before his men launched some paralyzing move against Rochambeau’s forces, he moved among them, saying in his soft voice: “Tomorrow we win Toussaint’s victory for him,” and next day when he struck, his drive was so relentless, so composed of cold fury, that the French could not withstand the waves of destruction that crashed down upon them. Toward the end of 1803 an infuriated Rochambeau told his generals: “Dammit, there’s no handling that little fiend,” and one afternoon he simply gave up the effort. There was no grandiloquent gesture, no honorable acknowledgment that the blacks had won. He simply called in his ships, then spent a night drafting a report to Napoleon explaining how, through trickery and deceit, Vaval had gained a few unimportant skirmishes but would have been totally defeated had not yellow fever intervened.

At the railing of the last French ship to leave St.-Domingue stood Jerome Espivent, headed for exile from the colony he loved. He was now in his sixties, his hair and Vandyke completely white. He had about his shoulders one of his black capes, and in his eyes there was a mist of profound regret as he watched his stone château growing ever smaller. “We should never have lost that land,” he said to a young officer from the Loire Valley. “It was all because of the free-coloreds,” he added, and when he turned back to see Le Cap, both it and his mansion had disappeared from view.

The attempt to whip the blacks of Toussaint and Vaval back into slavery had failed. The great Napoleon, having lost the richest colony in the world and nearly a hundred thousand of his best European troops, would now turn his attention to his own coronation as emperor and his chain of rampages through Europe, culminating in his retreat from Moscow. In his immortal journey he would humble a dozen kings and humiliate a score of generals, but he managed to outsmart the slave Toussaint only by an act of trickery and dishonor, while General Vaval defied him to the end.

In 1804, César Vaval, like the Roman general Cincinnatus in 458
B.C.
, retired to his land after a chain of significant victories and the establishment of the only black republic in the world. Since he had been a
slave in its fields, he was entitled to claim the entire Colibri Plantation of Espivent, but he took only the western portion, the part that contained the hill on which the Polish troops had chosen mass suicide rather than surrender. There he lived with his wife and three children, and sometimes in the evening he told them not of his own exploits, which he felt had been duplicated or excelled by several of Toussaint’s other generals, but of the extraordinary heroism of his father, the slave Vavak on the Danish plantation. And as he did so, the past became very real for his children. They could visualize themselves in Africa, or under the Danish lash on St. John, or in a small boat escaping to Puerto Rico and on to Haiti. Vaval drummed into them that they were descendants of exceptionally heroic people, and they felt obligated to sustain the tradition. Of their father’s heroics during the war of liberation they never spoke, nor was there need, for it was assumed that they would behave as he had.

Now, as a man nearing fifty, he was not happy with what he saw in his new nation. One of Toussaint’s vindictive generals, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, had recently proclaimed himself Emperor for Life. And what a vicious man, Vaval thought one evening as he sat atop the Polish hill. Last year Dessalines had broadcast an amnesty to all the islands of the Caribbean and even to South Carolina: “You whites who fled Haiti, come home. The past is forgotten. Come back and help us build a great new nation!” They came back, yes they did, white people homesick for the colony they had loved. And what happened when they got here?

Vaval sat for some time, head bowed, as he recalled those terrible scenes. When Dessalines had them all in hand, he proclaimed one morning: “Death to every white man in Haiti!” and the killing began. At Cap-Français, the place they now call Cap-Haïtien, he lined up hundreds of whites. They thought he was going to lecture them about their duties as citizens in the new nation. No, no! He murdered them all, maybe four hundred, maybe five. “Cleansing the nation,” he called it, and every white in Haiti was slain.

As night began to fall, Vaval looked toward Cap-Haïtien and wondered: Can horrible betrayals like this ever be cleansed from a land? Are there certain crimes that can never be expiated? And then, because he was a man of honor, he had to acknowledge his own guilt. When the whites had been disposed of, attention turned to the free-coloreds, and now Dessalines decreed: “Every free-colored is to be removed from Haiti,” and because it was known that Vaval despised
the free-coloreds and had frequently engaged them in battle, he was given the job of hunting them down in the north.

Mortally ashamed of his behavior in those frenzied days, Vaval recalled his siege of Meduc. Under the leadership of the Prémords, the coloreds of the region assembled at their plantation, where the fighting was brutal. Vaval could not subdue them, and one of his men asked scornfully: “Vaval? If you handled Leclerc so easily, why not these few free-coloreds?” and he had no answer. They were heroic.

Now came a kindlier remembrance. At the end of the battles, when Vaval had to retreat without having dislodged them, Julie Prémord came to him, and she suggested a nationwide truce to stop this senseless killing. She’d guarantee adherence of the free-coloreds if Vaval would speak for the blacks. But when he sent a horseman into Cap-Haïtien with her suggestion, Dessalines replied: “No truce. Exterminate them.” But that could not be done, because the Prémords, the Toussaints of their race, were defending their plantation most ably. So Vaval had to withdraw, knowing that the last sensible opportunity had been lost.

Then his memory flashed to a village square lined with palm trees. Throughout the nation the free-coloreds were being hunted down and slain. In the north they congregated at last in Meduc—the town in which the free-coloreds had once met secretly for their riotous dances—a remnant so powerless they had to surrender. Because Vaval had grown to respect them, he pleaded with the government that these final few be allowed to live quietly in their corner of the north. And he was listened to. In fact, he was dispatched to arrange the terms of surrender and forgiveness.

So at Meduc on a clear, fine day Vaval assembled the free-coloreds who were surrendering and stood with Prémord and his wife as the final details were arranged. “The war is ended,” Prémord cried in a clear, solid voice that commanded respect, and as Vaval turned to look at him he thought: What a handsome man! His color is so much more attractive than I used to think. Prémord continued: “We have a new nation and a new ruler. France is gone forever and with it domination by the whites. On this happy day we begin a lasting friendship between groups that have for too long been separated.” With that, he embraced Vaval, shouting to his followers: “See how two old enemies start their new friendship!” and everyone cheered.

Then, from a cottage near the square where they were meeting,
the self-proclaimed emperor came out, and he cried in a wild voice: “Kill them all!” and his black troops rushed forth with bayonets and guns and murdered every one of the five hundred who had come to make peace. Prémord and his wife, who were standing with Vaval, clutched at his arms, and Xavier cried in anguish: “Vaval, what’s happening?” Before Vaval could intercede, they were torn from him, speared with bayonets a dozen times and thrown into a ditch. Not one free-colored survived, and those few who had hidden in the rest of the north were hunted down like animals and exterminated.
^*

These memories proved too painful for Vaval. With a wild, gasping sound he clutched at his throat: My God! What a terrible burden we’ve placed on our land! In 1789 it contained half a million prosperous and well-behaved people; now, probably less than two hundred thousand, they say. Plus all the dead English and Spanish and Polish invaders. Can a land tolerate such brutal abuse? Does the blood spilled upon it not contaminate it? Is our new Haiti condemned to be a ghost that will never be real?

Looking again to the north, he could see the roof of the château at Cap-Haïtien and the multiple massacres its inhabitants had known: 1791, 1793, 1799, 1802 … no land could absorb such devastation; the scars would never be erased. He thought of the individuals responsible for this unending tragedy:
grands blancs
like Jerome Espivent, who hated both blacks and free-coloreds. And then he winced: Or blacks like me, who “cleansed the land” of whites and coloreds alike. Well, now we have our black nation, totally black, and what are we going to make of it?

As the dark cloud of night spread over his tormented land, he wondered if it would ever lift.

^*
Dessalines’ behavior became so murderously irrational that his two military cohorts, Pétion and Christophe, decided that there was no other course but to murder him, which they did. Thus began that recurring cycle of dictatorship, mismanagement and assassination that would plague Haiti henceforth.