I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [86]
Determined not to miss Henri Christophe’s fantastic palace and citadel, we grabbed a few days to visit Cap-Haitien. The town was studded with exquisite little houses, painted in different colors, and bursting with flowers—right out of the best of Haitian paintings.
Since it was the richest of the French colonies, Napoleon exploited Haiti’s wealth for his wars. When the slaves revolted, he sent a fleet with an army of elite troops to crush the insurgency. Led by General Leclerc and fueled by arrogance, the French underestimated the passionately driven guerilla fighters, and their allies, malaria and tropical heat. The French armies were defeated, and fled.
For the plantation owners who had made Haiti their home, the world turned from white to black, and those colonials not dead fled with many of their servants, leaving behind a bevy of European chefs, musicians, acrobats, and performers who had found employment entertaining them. A number of these artists emigrated to the southern coast of the United States and brought their sensibilities with them—baroque music and French folk songs, spiced with Haitian and African influences—a bouillabaisse melding to jambalaya. Many of these artist-refugees found employment in service to southern planters.
Alan Jones, a choreographer, aficionado, and scholar of baroque dance, described how the indigenous music and dance of Georgia and the Carolinas were galvanized and transformed by this infusion. Among records from a Carolina plantation, he discovered a description of a baroque pas de deux danced on a tightrope by two acrobat-dancers from French Haiti. To my delight, Kay Gayner already knew about these influences: “Pockets of the Georgia Sea Islands, where I grew up, are renowned for preserving the language, storytelling, and arts of Gullah slave culture, and the Haitian presence there was powerful. Gullah is a unique mixture of the rhythms, rituals, dance movements, and language of West Africa, Brazil, and Haiti.” While writing this book, on a whim I took a break with Kay and, bound and limited by a single line, an imaginary tightrope sketched on the floor, invented and danced a minuet.
After the French defeat in Haiti, one of the leaders of the slave rebellion, Henri Christophe, built himself a kingdom, with the town Cap-Haitien as its capital. On a hill outside the town, he built a model of a famous palace in Potsdam, Germany, Sans-Souci. He envisioned himself as a new Louis XIV, only black, and as king, he needed a court of nobles, so he dubbed many of his cronies with made-up aristocratic titles and names—the Duke of Marmalade, Count Frangipani, Lady Marzipan. Clad in fantastic uniforms and ball gowns, the king and his court held ballets and cotillions. His Royal Highness insisted that pink be the prevailing color for the gowns, as he felt the blushing shade best complemented the black skin of his noble ladies.
Haunted by fears the French might return, Henri built himself an escape aerie overlooking his Sans-Souci, a fortress on a mountaintop so enormous it transformed the shape of the mountain, with walls so thick that a horse and carriage could drive along the wall’s edges with space to spare. He forced his subjects to drag hundreds of giant cannons up the mountain and install them with tens of thousands of cannonballs stacked in pyramids nearby, ready to be fired. Unknown numbers of “liberated” slaves died building Henri’s folly—all in preparation for the return of the French. Not one cannon ever discharged a shot.
Within ten years, his subjects revolted. As the revolutionaries infested Sans-Souci, Henri retreated to his bedroom, wrapped himself in a white satin robe, put a pistol to his head, and killed himself with a golden bullet he had years before prepared for the occasion. Improvising a stretcher