“I’ll bring them to heel,” cried the young Commissioner, slamming his fist on the deliberation table, surrounded by some of his supporters.
“The Spanish already occupy Vallière, Fort Dauphin, Grande Rivière du Nord…”
“Enough,” interrupted Sonthonax, a bundle of nerves. “I want to be left alone.”
He was backed into a corner, he realized. It was only a matter of a few hours before the Spanish troops invaded the northern province…
He put his head between his hands, elbows on the table.
All of a sudden, he sat up with an expression of strange satisfaction.
He slammed his fist down on the table for a second time, but this time with a burst of laughter.
“I’ll bring them to heel,” he screamed.
Then taking a sheet of paper, he feverishly wrote the following words:
The lands of Saint-Domingue should be the property of the Blacks; they have earned them by the sweat of their brow.
A freedman entered at that very moment. Breathless and drenched in sweat, he had clearly traveled a long way on horseback.
“Monsieur the Commissioner,” he began, out of breath, “the enemy has just invaded Limbé and Borgne…”
“Very well, but they’ll retreat soon enough,” responded Sonthonax with such certainty in his voice that the freedman stared at him in astonishment. “Yes, they’ll retreat even if I have to make the forces of liberty shoot out of the very ground in Saint-Domingue…”
Seeing that the freedman was staring at him wide-eyed, he continued:
“The slaves, the slaves…Only they can help us win this fight! Now do you understand? Go on, get me the other freedmen. I need messengers to reach the bands of rebels hiding in the area…What am I promising them in return? Huh? What am I promising them? Why, their freedom, of course, their freedom – do you hear me?” he sang in a terrible voice. “So what are you waiting for? Run along!”
And thus it was that three completely distinct classes, divided for hundreds of years, were integrated for the first time. The enemy defeated, Commissioner Sonthonax proclaimed the freedom of the slaves in the North.
Surrounded and cheered by the crowd, the young Commissioner declared all Negroes and mixed-bloods of the northern provinces to be Frenchmen.
This time, Scipion was the one to give Minette the news. She was sitting on her bed, softly humming an opera melody. She stopped from time to time, astonished by her breathlessness and by the sharp little pains that kept her from forgetting her wound.
“Zoé,” she called, “do you think I’ll ever get better? Do you think I’ll ever be able to sing again?”
“The healer says not for another three months…”
“She doesn’t know what she’s talking about, that healer. I feel like I’ve lost my voice…”
“Come now, don’t go exaggerating. Your wound was poorly treated. You need rest, lots of rest, and good care. Lapointe promised to move heaven and earth to find a doctor for you – a good one…”
Scipion entered at that moment.
“Mistress,” he cried, “there are no more slaves. The commissioners freed us all!”
“What are you saying?”
“Commissioner Sonthonax just arrived from Cap-Français. He’s at the parade grounds with the crowd…There are no more slaves…”
Minette and Zoé ran outside.
The populace had gathered at the parade grounds, where an altar to the Fatherland was being erected. Women carrying garlands and flags helped to decorate it. The main street, covered with palm fronds and flowers, awaited the procession. A delightful sensation suffused Minette’s heart. She saw herself in the bed she had slept in as a little girl, arms wrapped around Lise, telling her:
“I’d like to buy all the slaves in Saint-Domingue and then free them…”
At last her dream had become a reality. She had lived long enough to see the cause of the freedmen and the slaves emerge victorious.
All around her, the ruins and the cadavers seemed revived. Her eyes fixed on a pile of ashes, she once again saw the Comédie. Everything was in its place again – everything and everyone: Jasmine, Lise, young Jean, Goulard, the Acquaires, the missing – all the missing – communed with the crowd on that day with the same enthusiastic energy.
It was Polvérel who spoke. He called the former slaves “French citizens” and explained to them what Liberty was.
Labadie was among them. After having signed, he embraced some of his people. They cheered him. The crowd, overcome with emotion, following the Commissioner, began to intone a sublime song of love and peace.
“I’m going to sing,” Minette said to Zoé, grasping her hand.
“Have you forgotten your wound?”
“No, but I’ve got to sing.”
“Don’t be foolish…”
But Zoé had the impression that Minette was not listening to her. Minette seemed to be alone in the midst of the crowd, alone or with someone with whom she was pleading. Her hands joined and her tense attitude betrayed a determination that had nothing to with a simple desire to sing. It was something else – an escape to the beyond, perhaps just the simple idea that she could help with the miracle – a little girl’s dream, drawn from a well of superstition, to which she could not help but cede.
The crowd had just stopped singing. Minette looked up at the sky. It was so blue that her heart swelled with a feeling of gentle gratitude. In the end, it deserved to be lived, this life. Yes, despite all those who had departed, despite the bitter struggles, the evils, and the injustices…Such a day deserved to be celebrated spectacularly. Her whole life, Minette had dreamed of living just that. She thought of Lapointe at that moment and her expression became almost pained.
It was for him that she would sing – only for him. She knew it. To sing so that the miracle would reach him. Because, My God, she had just learned that nothing was sure in this world. No matter how long it took, the struggle was never in vain. She had just had the proof that the world could be transformed and rebuilt. Had Saint-Domingue not been reborn from its fraught past, erasing three centuries’ worth of disgrace in a single day?…
With her two hands, Minette pressed against her heart and launched her magnificent voice into a final effort, taking up the song of peace all alone.
The commissioners looked around for the citizen they heard singing. Her voice, mixed with the sound of the bells, was an unparalleled message of gratitude directed toward the heavens.
A message that reached Lapointe, perhaps, on the road leading to Port-au-Prince, for he was only a few minutes from the center of town.
He had finally found a doctor for Minette. The man was an old Jesuit priest, dressed in a filthy cassock, whom he had managed to load onto a lazy, shriveled mule. Lapointe was giving him an aggressive sidelong glance. At that pace, they risked arriving in Port-au-Prince at nightfall. Clutching the mule’s saddle, his skinny legs almost touching the ground, the old priest made for a sad picture on his mount.
“Tell me, Father, is there no way to make you go any faster?”
“My son, I didn’t hide the fact that this is the first time I’ve ever been in a saddle. And if it weren’t for this gentle old mule, I would have refused to follow you categorically…”
Ahead of them, the road stretched out, sunny in places, shady in others, reflecting their distorted silhouette.
Lapointe boiled with impatience. At several points he had to fight the urge to dump the old Jesuit and race back to Port-au-Prince.
“I’m told that Sonthonax has proclaimed the liberty of all the slaves in the North,” said the priest.
“It would seem…”
“The way things are going, soon there’ll be no more slaves left in the country.”
“If they move as slowly as our horses, this may very well last for some time.”
Surprised by Lapointe’s angry gaze, the priest tried to spur on his mule by giving him several awkward kicks in the stomach. Having slippe
d from the saddle, he did his best to prop himself up and lowered his head timidly.
Since learning of what had happened in the North, Lapointe had been struggling with a serious personal conflict. He had read the Abbé Raynal, the Abbé Grégoire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau…He was aware that there were Whites who fought on behalf of the slaves, who called for the end of class divisions, and who denounced slavery as the most shameful of institutions. And here was this young Girondist, fresh from France, who had set himself up as righter of wrongs – taking on the planters and declaring the emancipation of the slaves.
And so what about that? Sonthonax had no need of slaves to help him establish his social position. Whites could make and even unmake the laws. It was only natural that some of them were slaveholders for the love of profit while others were abolitionists out of dilettantism. He could not help thinking that he had collected enough enviable titles to do without slaves. Had he not just recently been named Mayor of Arcahaie? Henceforth, he had an established social position. To hell with everyone else…After a restless night of strange dreams, he had awoken with the painful feeling that he had dreamed of his mother, the little slave girl with the soulful and fearful gaze…
Lapointe lifted his straw hat and mopped at the sweat on his forehead. Memories came into his thoughts with a tenacity that seemed almost obsessive. He saw himself as a little boy, playing in front of his father’s hut. His father had been a despotic, unintelligent Mulatto who made his slaves tremble merely by looking at them. How old was he then? Six, seven years – he could not recall anymore, but he relived that scene as if it had been just yesterday: the big hunting dog that had attacked him, and his mother, so small and thin, fighting desperately to tear him from the jaws of the beast, rolling on the ground with it and strangling it. After the struggle, she had been left so weak and trembling that someone had carried her back to the hut, where the master had shouted at her for killing his animal…
“There it is – Port-au-Prince!” cried the priest triumphantly. “My mule truly will have made a fine journey.”
Lapointe shivered as if he had just awoken from a dream. On the other side of the road, Bel-Air seemed to be cluttered with the burned-up debris of the former homes. An odor of wet smoke, slaked lime, and death emanated from the ruins.
“It’s all of this, all of this that keeps me from forgiving them,” said Lapointe angrily as he looked around.
“Civilization comes from great men, but just as with small men, ‘they know not what they do.’ It’s their only excuse, my son.”
On the parade grounds, they came upon a meditative crowd. A woman’s voice was singing a divine melody and the priest found the voice so singular that he stopped for a moment to listen.
“I was in Italy once, a long time ago. Who in this country can sing that melody if not La Dugazon herself?”
He had turned to Lapointe, but the latter had abandoned him right there and dismounted his horse to run into the crowd.
Minette was singing, surrounded by her friends: Joseph, Pétion, Labadie, Zoé, Beauvais, Lambert, and the others…
She was foolish to sing with her wound so badly healed. How had they allowed her to do that? He looked around for Zoé and then gestured toward Minette with his chin and frowned. She answered him with a gesture of helplessness.
The old priest had managed to catch up to him. Adjusting his glasses on his nose, he looked at Minette curiously.
“So, young man, shall we go see about that sick friend of yours?”
“There she is, Father.”
Minette had just noticed him in the crowd. A slight smile played across her lips then disappeared, replaced by a worried expression as she noted the shock in his eyes. He took two steps forward, as if to interrupt her singing. She stopped him with a gesture, without breaking his gaze. He looked anxiously at the crowd, for once all together without hatred or prejudice – at these men who yesterday had been planters now coming to the altar and accepting the transformation of their slaves into free men. Was he going to side with them or with those who would rather see the colony destroyed than accept the idea of Equality for all?
The memory of his mother once again passed through his thoughts. He smiled to himself as if to recognize that he had fallen prey to a certain romanticism. But how nice it was not to feel ashamed of that. So he had gotten the better of himself – he, Lapointe, was going to cede, to abdicate, to renounce all those things to which he had clutched his whole life, like some sort of lifeline. Another smile danced across his face. Removing his straw hat, he turned it around in his fingers, as if intimidated. Then shrugging his shoulders, he walked up to the altar. He was about to sign, when Minette’s voice faltered on the final note. He turned around, anguished. Supported by Zoé, she was vomiting blood. He reached her in a flash and took her in his arms.
The crowd gathered around them, curious.
“She’s fainted! Is there a doctor here?” whimpered Zoé.
With difficulty, the old priest made his way through the crowd. With an authoritative gesture, he stopped Lapointe who, trembling, had been unbuttoning Minette’s bodice.
“Wait…”
He bent down, placed his ear to Minette’s left breast and then to her face. He finally raised his head with a strangely dazed expression and, without looking at Lapointe, muttered as if talking to himself.
“Truly, truly…with a voice like that…”
Lapointe glanced at him with an expressionless look in which the priest could nonetheless see a despair so dismal that he could not speak to him.
He advanced slowly, looking straight ahead of himself with that faraway gaze, so blank it was almost terrifying. His face drenched with sweat, his breathing ragged, he carried her to Zoé’s house. When Joseph tried to help him, he shook his head stubbornly and placed her on the bed without looking at her. Her eyes were open. Joseph leaned over her, made the sign of the cross and, with the gesture of a priest officiating for the very first time, closed her eyes.
For a moment, Lapointe seemed to be struggling desperately with himself. He was holding back his tears with a stoic attitude that was fooling no one. Then suddenly throwing himself on the bed, he hid his head in his hands and wept.
When he stood up, Zoé could see an unspeakable expression of bitterness and hatred in his eyes.
“They killed her – they killed her, Zoé,” he muttered, as if lost…
She placed her hand on his shoulder.
“Calm yourself.”
“It’s their fault – it’s their fault and they will pay dearly.”
“Be quiet,” said Pétion, a lump in his throat.
Joseph was praying next to the bed.
Lapointe took his watch, looked at it and then, throwing it aside in a gesture of terrifying rage, broke it on the floorboards.
Zoé jumped. Had he gone mad? His eyes were haggard, his mouth trembling, and the veins in his face seemed ready to burst.
“Calm yourself,” she repeated gently.
He fell to his knees and stretched out his hand toward the bed:
“I swear to avenge your death,” he said. “The Whites will pay dearly for this crime. I swear it…”
At that moment, Jean-Baptiste Lapointe’s eyes met Joseph’s, and he lowered them.
He spent the night at her bedside without saying another word and without even seeming to notice Pétion and Joseph, who were also sitting up with her.
The burial took place the next day. He followed along with the others, head lowered, arms folded across his chest, without speaking a word. Only in hearing someone weep near him did he notice and recognize Scipion.
That very day, he returned to Arcahaie. Learning that a plot had been hatched against him, he seized the occasion and arrested the conspirators. With his own hands, he cut the throats of thirty Whites without even a semblance of a trial. He then boarded a ship along with his men and, without the slightest hesitation, cut off another twenty heads on a hastily assembled scaffold. His shirt, his
arms, his breeches – they were all stained with blood and bits of flesh. He had been transformed into a horrific butcher.
His sorry task completed, he looked at his hands and burst into a laugh that the men in his company knew was truly diabolical.
Two days later, following the example of the white colonists and the mulatto slaveholders, he turned Arcahaie over to the English.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book is based on historical documents. The two heroines and all the principal characters are real figures, and all have kept their real names.* The major events of their lives, as well as all historical events recounted here, are completely authentic.
* * *
* Theater in Saint-Domingue, by Jean Fouchard. (note in original)
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Dance on the Volcano Page 40
