The Black Jacobins

Novelists are forever treading the terrain of history, even (or perhaps especially) when their inventions seem to lack any visible traces of the footprints left by experience. And yet only when writers take up their pens in the name of something called “historical fiction” do academic historians tend to worry about protecting their own turf. It is the closeness of the historical novel to history, not their distance from each other, that makes some scholars feel the need to maintain a constant line between the “sacred” space of the factual and the “profane” realm of the imagined.

It would be unfortunate, however, if the debate over the nature and scope of scholarly objectivity were to overshadow the achievement of Madison Smartt Bell’s superb novel about the Haitian Revolution. For one part of that achievement is to demonstrate again why history is about more than simply guarding the boundary between truth and falsehood (whether intentional or not). If the task of recovering the lived experience of bygone ages did not have an inescapably literary dimension, it would be easier for professional chroniclers of the past to overlook the work of their counterparts in the world of creative writing.

Not that Bell’s subject has been difficult for historians to ignore. Long consigned to the sidelines of scholarship on the late 18th century Atlantic (that is, French and American) revolutions, the modern world’s only successful slave uprising unfolded between 1791 and 1804 in what was then the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue on the divided territory of Hispaniola. That Haiti’s revolution is finally beginning to emerge from the historiographical shadow cast by its two more famous counterparts is the result in part of writers such as Bell, whose exuberant and epic novel is marked throughout by a palpable passion for the troubled Caribbean nation and its contributions to the shaping of the modern democratic world. Reading this book, one can begin to understand what it might have meant to live in the Haiti of two centuries ago, how it could have felt to travel across its mountainous landscape, labor in its plantations, taste its sugar, coffee and rum.

Over the course of more than 700 densely packed pages, the novel weaves between the personal and public lives of its main characters with a consistency that both disguises and betrays its grounding in historical sources. This narrative approach will be familiar to readers of Bell’s previous book. A finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, “All Souls’ Rising” covered the opening years of the Haitian Revolution, beginning in August 1791 with a voodoo-inspired slave revolt in the northern plains of the colony. “Master of the Crossroads,” the second book in a planned trilogy, picks up the narrative in the latter half of 1793, just as Toussaint L’Ouverture is beginning to acquire the grass-roots military support that will make him the undisputed leader of the black revolution.

On the eve of the revolt, Saint-Domingue was populated by about 450,000 slaves (mostly African-born), roughly 30,000 mulattos (or persons of mixed race) and about 40,000 whites (who were in turn divided into grand blanc slaveholders of royalist inclinations and petit blanc artisans of republican sympathies). Old Regime society was characterized by endemic, crisscrossing tensions among all three of these groups, tensions that the revolution intensified. Indeed, as Carl von Clausewitz might have observed, one could well interpret the history of Haiti between 1791 and 1804--and to some extent even beyond--as the continuation of colonial racial politics through warfare.

That at least seems to be the underlying thrust of Bell’s narrative of the slave revolution. “Master of the Crossroads” takes us beneath the surface and into the heart of this epidermal maelstrom, portraying the unfolding events from the divergent perspectives of a handful of black, mulatto and white characters. (Some of these personalities are carried over from the previous volume, but it is not necessary to have read “All Souls’ Rising” to follow its successor).

L’Ouverture’s trusted scribe and doctor-in-chief, a white man named Antoine Hebert, arrives in the colony only months before the August 1791 slave revolt and is never far from the center of “Master of the Crossroads.” Based on a historical character, Hebert is portrayed as constantly shifting his attention between the military needs of the moment and his relationship with a mulatto woman named Nanon and their child Paul. Nanon is pursued simultaneously by an abusive mulatto officer named Choufleur, Hebert’s principal rival and a persistent threat to the aspirations of L’Ouverture and the black revolution. For the most part, Bell makes effective use of this triangular relationship to embody the overlapping conflicts among Haiti’s three principal social factions. At times, however, the novel’s commitment to exploring those divisions in their full complexity gives way to a rather monochrome portrait of Choufleur, whose quasi-diabolical persona makes him the one true antagonist in an otherwise unpredictable and varied cast of characters. (On more than one occasion, Bell seems to hold even the freckles on Choufleur’s face against him.)

Bell is more suggestive and nuanced with a former slave named Riau, another of L’Ouverture’s scribes, whose narrative voice shifts almost imperceptibly between the first and third persons at various points in the novel, a metaphorical and literal expression of the ephemeral human experience that Bell suggests is central to voodoo religious identity. In a wonderfully empathetic passage that follows shortly after his introduction in the novel, Riau relates how he frees a slave named Bouquart from the weighted leg irons used to restrain runaways. A crowd of ex-slaves gathers around the firelight to observe what happens when Riau, using a set of red-hot tools, cuts through each of the nabots: “They fell in their hinged halves, like heavy melons, and when each one opened there was a sigh, from the people watching out of the darkness, like a breath of wind.” After taking his first step, Bouquart finds that “his knee shot up so high it nearly hit him in the face. . . . In the shadows the people laughed and clapped, and some began to come forward toward the light, the women’s hips moving as though they would dance.”

By far the leading voice and symbol of the slaves’ passage to freedom is not Riau but L’Ouverture. And yet though he is clearly at the heart of the book’s action, he remains strangely opaque. A product of the anomalous free black population of pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue, Bell’s L’Ouverture comes across as a complicated bundle of principled leadership and Machiavellian strategizing, mysterious and inscrutable.

As if to reinforce this sense of emotional detachment, the novel largely refrains from trying to connect the public and personal dots of L’Ouverture’s career, despite the rare references to facets of his family life. As L’Ouverture rises to military prominence, as he shifts loyalties from Spain to France and then negotiates a series of complicated relationships with various representatives sent by the French Republic to keep things under control, a different sort of correlation between collective and individual experience begins to take over the novel. Without reducing the history of the Haitian Revolution to the biography of its most famous personality, Bell makes clear the extent to which the success of the struggle will depend upon the sometimes split-second, always intuitive decisions of L’Ouverture. Over a period of eight years (1793-1801), a combination of uncanny skill and sheer good fortune enables him to ward off the combined threats of a British invasion and mulatto rebellions in the north and south.

Through all of the twists and turns of revolutionary violence and counter-violence, “Master of the Crossroads” keeps returning to the more prosaic dimensions of its characters’ lives and their journeys across the scarred landscapes of fin de siecle Haiti. This focus on the quotidian insures the novel against becoming a mere sensationalist account of military exploits; it also distinguishes the book from what might have been a more conventional historical narrative of the revolution. Bell has done more with the genre of historical fiction than simply use it to transcend the limitations of documentary evidence (which he incorporates at various points by quoting from some of L’Ouverture’s better-known letters and reproducing the original French texts in an appendix). He has used his novelistic license to evoke, at times quite poignantly, a shadow world of alternative possibilities that seems to fly in the face of the racial violence so graphically recounted in the book.

Very late in the novel, for example, when Hebert has his long-awaited reunion with Nanon, he discovers that she has given birth to “twins” of noticeably different complexion. Skeptical that Nanon is the mother of both and that he (rather than Choufleur) is the father of either, the doctor nonetheless resolves to accept the children as his own and to ask for Nanon’s hand in marriage. Shortly afterward, when his suspicions on both counts are confirmed, Hebert reacts simply and calmly: “You take what you are given. As they are offered to me, I claim them.” Perched next to the doctor during this scene, a Creole-speaking green parrot intones one of its two stock phrases: “M’ap prie pou’w (I will pray for you).” Normally uttered only after the parrot receives a piece of food, the expression of thanks becomes a prayer for the state of multiracial toleration that might have survived a less cruel regime of colonial slavery and a more forgiving war of black liberation.

Thanks to passages like these, “Master of the Crossroads” occupies an altogether higher level of literary achievement than its predecessor. There is here a feel for the dramatic contingency of events, a richness of physical and psychological detail and a humane understanding of the tragic complexities of racial conflict that were simply not present to the same degree in “All Souls’ Rising.” It is in this last context above all (the representation of racial warfare and its nuances) that Bell’s novel succeeds where less imaginative histories of the Haitian Revolution have tended to disappoint. The virtues of this book make one look forward to Bell’s third volume on the final years of the revolution. L’Ouverture was captured in 1802 by Napoleon’s forces and imprisoned in the French Alps, along the Swiss border. He died there a year later. Napoleon sent an enormous expedition to restore French rule to Saint-Domingue but failed to prevent Haiti from achieving its independence at the end of 1803.

As the bicentennial of that independence approaches, we will see an expanding list of nonfiction titles about a revolution whose origins, course and consequences are still far from exhausted. It is entirely possible that some of these books will seek to distinguish themselves from Bell’s trilogy by offering a more “objective” or “definitive” account. Whether they will be more successful as history in the fuller sense of that term is another question. In the meantime, Bell has taught historians a thing or two about what it means to have an intimate relationship with the past. Throwing caution to the wind, he has taken up a little-known but hugely important subject with passion and conviction. “Master of the Crossroads” is a labor of love, and the spell of Bell’s romance with Haiti is manifest throughout.