Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [37]
She raised her hands high in the air, aiming them at the twinkling sea as if to both scold and embrace it.
“They do,” I said.
“Why didn’t Marius come back?” She seemed to be asking both me and the sea.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It’s stupid to even ask,” she said, scratching the short gray hair under the white kerchief that covered her head. “How could any of us know the answer to something like that? Only the sea and God know. Right?”
“Right,” I echoed, still treading carefully after her rebuke.
“I suppose I should be glad we didn’t lose him at sea,” she said.
With her eyes still on the water, she got up and peeled off her milky white clothes. Wearing only her red bra and dark panties, she walked toward the ocean for an afternoon swim.
CHAPTER 7
Bicentennial
Two hundred years had passed since the Western Hemisphere’s second republic was created. Back then, there were no congratulatory salutes from the first, the United States of America. The new republic, Haiti, had gained its independence through a bloody twelve-year slave uprising, the only time in the history of the world that bond servants successfully overthrew their masters and formed their own state.
The two young nations had several things in common. Both had been heavily taxed colonies, and both had visionary leaders whose words had the power to inspire men to fight. Compare, for example, Thomas Jefferson’s vision of the tree of liberty as one that must be “refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” with that of the Haitian general Toussaint L’Ouverture who, as he was captured by the French and was being taken to his death, declared, “In overthrowing me they have only felled the tree of Negro liberty. . . . It will shoot up again, for it is deeply rooted and its roots are many.”
The fact that the United States of America was not more supportive of its smaller, slightly younger neighbor had a great deal to do with L’Ouverture’s roots, which were African and which were now planted in America’s backyard. Thomas Jefferson, who had drafted the declaration that defined his own nation’s insurgency and who had witnessed and praised the French Revolution, knew exactly what revolutions meant. Their essence was not in their instantaneous bursts of glory but in their ripple effect across borders and time, their ability to put the impossible within reach and make the downtrodden seem mighty. And he feared that Haiti’s revolt would inspire similar actions in the United States. “If something is not done, and soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children,” Jefferson wrote about the potential impact of the Haitian uprising.
Haiti’s very existence highlighted the deepest contradictions of the American revolutionary experiment. The U.S. Declaration of Independence stated that all men were created equal, but Haitian slaves and free men and women of color battled what was then one of the world’s most powerful armies to prove it. Yet how could the man who wrote about freedom in such transcendent terms have failed to hear echoes of his own country’s revolutionary struggle, and victory, in the Haitians’ urgent desire for self-rule? Possibly because as a slaveowner and the leader of slaveholders he couldn’t manage to reconcile dealing with one group of Africans as leaders and another as chattel. So Haiti’s independence remained unrecognized by Thomas Jefferson, who urged Congress to suspend commerce with the nascent nation, declaring its leaders “cannibals of the terrible republic.”
Timothy Pickering, a senator from Massachusetts who had served as John Adams’s secretary of state, wrote to Jefferson to protest his refusal to aid the new Haitian republic. “Are these men not merely to be abandoned to their own efforts but to be deprived of those necessary supplies which for a series of years, they have been accustomed to receive from the United States, and without which they cannot subsist?” Pickering asked.
Yet the United