Master of the Crossroads (102 page)

CLASSIFICATION OF RACES IN COLONIAL SAINT DOMINGUE

From
Description Topographique, Physique, Civile, Polique et Historique
de la Partie Française de l’Isle Saint Domingue
by Médéric-Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint Méry, 1797.

RÉSULTAT

De toutes les nuances, produites par les diverses combinaisons du mélange des Blancs avec les Nègres, et des Nègres avec les Caraïbes ou Sauvages ou Indiens Occidentaux, et avec les Indiens Orientaux.

A NOTE ON CREOLE ORTHOGRAPHY

Haitian Creole, which evolved from the contact of various African languages with French during the epoch of slavery on Hispaniola, is today, officially and in fact, the language of Haiti—a language which enjoys a vast reservoir of oral history and proverbs, and a rapidly growing written literature. In the latter half of the twentieth century, several systems for writing Creole were proposed and one of these has now been almost universally adopted.

In the colonial period, and for most of the nineteenth century, Haitian Creole had small status, and was considered to be a debased
patois
rather than a language in its own right; the official language of Haiti was French. The Creole of this period had no systematic orthography. To the extent that it was rendered in writing at all, it was written phonetically in a manner derived from French orthography.

Most of the Creole in this book is a similar phonetic rendering, which approximates the way Creole was recorded by travelers and historians during the period these events take place, from 1794 to 1803. In some cases Creole passages (e.g., Vodou songs) follow the more recent orthographies from the sources from which they are derived, but in general the orthography used in this book is not current.

PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Portions of this novel have appeared, sometimes in a slightly different form, in
Granta, The Reading Room, The Idaho Review, Five Points, Virginia Quarterly Review, Agni, Gulf Coast, New England Review,
and the
Chattahoochee
Review.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Universal Music Publishing Group:
Excerpts from “Kalfou Danjere” words and music by Theodore Beaubrun, Jr., Daniel Beaubrun and Mimerose Beaubrun. Copyright © 1992 by Universal-Songs of PolyGram Int., Inc., a division of Universal Studios, Inc. (BMI). International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Universal Music Publishing Group.

The lyrics on pages 185, 314, and 396 are reprinted from
Voodoo in
Haiti
by Alfred Métraux, published by Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. The lyrics on pages 651–52 are reprinted from
Angels in the Mirror: Vodou Music of Haiti,
edited by Elizabeth McAlister, published by Ellipsis Arts. The other Vodou songs quoted in the text are amalgams, without a single source.

Madison Smartt Bell

MASTER
of the
CROSSROADS

Madison Smartt Bell is the author of fourteen works of fiction, including
The Stone That the Builder Refused
;
All Souls’ Rising
;
Save Me, Joe Louis
;
Dr. Sleep
;
Soldier’s
Joy
; and
Ten Indians
. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, with his family and teaches at Goucher College.

ALSO BY MADISON SMARTT BELL

The Stone That the Builder Refused
Anything Goes
All Souls’ Rising
Narrative Design
Ten Indians
Save Me, Joe Louis
Dr. Sleep
Barking Man and Other Stories
Soldier’s Joy
The Year of Silence
Zero db and Other Stories
Straight Cut
Waiting for the End of the World
The Washington Square Ensemble

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 2004

Copyright © 2000 by Madison Smartt Bell

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Permissions acknowledgments appear at the end of the book.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Bell, Madison Smartt.
Master of the crossroads / Madison Smartt Bell.
p. cm.
1. Haiti—History—Revolution, 1791–1804—Fiction.
2. Toussaint Louverture, 1743–1803—Fiction.
3. Slave insurrections—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3552.E517 M’.54—dc21 00-029835

www.vintagebooks.com

www.randomhouse.com

eISBN: 978-0-307-42679-6

v3.0