Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [30]
*An old priest in the Cul de Sac plain argued (years after the insurrection had bloomed into revolution, Toussaint had been deported to France, and the independence of Haiti had been declared) that Toussaint's absence from the early phases of the insurrection was explained by the fact the Arada iwa, water spirits who were his ancestral protectors and guides, forbade him to associate with the angry fiery Petro iwa invoked at Bois Caiman to lend the heat of their rage to the destruction of the slave-master colonists. To this day some explain Haiti's difficulty in ending its cycles of political violence by the fact that the revolution was originally founded on fire instead of water.
TWO
Before the Storm
The second son of Toussaint's legal marriage, Isaac Louverture, wrote two memoirs concerning his father. The first is an anecdotal account of events, most of which Isaac personally witnessed, during the invasion of Toussaint's Saint Domingue by Napoleon Bonaparte's army. The second, though less complete and more fragmentary than the other, is almost the only source available on Toussaint's ancestry and his childhood. The memoir which Toussaint himself wrote during his final imprisonment is wonderfully vague on these matters. Though it is a sort of autobiography, Toussaint's memoir was meant as a legal brief for a military trial which never took place, and so cannot safely be taken at its full and apparent face value.
What becomes obvious from his memoir, his correspondence, his proclamations and public addresses, his more casual statements that have survived in memory, and even from the way he told a tale of himself through his actions, is that Toussaint Louverture always shaped and controlled his own story—the narrative which presented him as a character—with great deliberation, care, and ingenuity. His awareness of the importance of his public image, and that it could be fashioned without a very strict regard for the truth, is one of the several peculiarly modern qualities that put him centuries ahead of his time.
Isaac Louverture had been sent to school in France in his early teens. He returned to Saint Domingue in 1802, essentially as a hostage of the army sent by Napoleon Bonaparte to subdue what Bonaparte had decided to regard as a rebellion against the authority of what was swiftly becoming his government in France. Isaac's reunion with Toussaint was brief, and it is unlikely that he had any opportunity to speak to his father again after both were arrested later that year. Though Toussaint was deported from Saint Domingue on the same ship as his wife Suzanne and his three legitimate sons, he was allowed no contact with them during the voyage and in France he was imprisoned in a province far from his family. Isaac never returned to the island of his birth, so his notes on Toussaint's life before Napoleon's invasion depend on his own childhood memories, and probably those of his mother, who finished her days in Agen, near him. Thus it is possible that elements of his story are apocryphal.
By Isaac's report, Toussaint was the grandson of an African king named Gaou-Guinou, of the Arada “warrior nation.”1 Intertribal African wars were a constant source of supply for the slave trade. Gaou-Guinou's second son (also and somewhat confusingly known as Gaou-Guinou) was captured in one of these and sold to traders who shipped him to Saint Domingue, apparently along with numerous warriors of his tribe. The colonial writer Moreau Saint-Mery describes the Aradas, who came from Africa's Gold Coast and whose reddish yellow skin tone often caused them to be mistaken for mulattoes in Saint Domingue, as well-known for both intelligence and ferocity.
The unfortunate African prince and his tribesmen ended up on Breda Plantation, near the village called Haut du Cap, just a few miles southeast of Cap Francais (and a few more miles northwest of Bois Caiman). “Far from his native land,” writes Isaac, in the flowery French style of the early nineteenth century, “the second son of Gaou-Guinou