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By Root 808 0

no longer heard … the fierce and terrible songs of the warriors of his nation, in which they celebrated the valor of their king and of his ancestors; but he had held on to their memory. In his captivity he met some of his own who, subjects like himself in another hemisphere, recognized him for their prince, and paid him homage, and saluted him after the fashion of their country. Humanity and good intentions soft-ened misfortune in the establishment of the comte de Noe. He [the African prince] enjoyed total liberty on the lands of his protector. He had five blacks to cultivate a portion of land which was assigned to him. The Catholic religion became his own; he married a beautiful and virtuous woman of his country. Both of them died almost at the same time, leaving five male children, of whom the youngest, who resembled his ancestor,* received the name of Gaou, and three daughters. The oldest of the five male children was Toussaint-Louverture, less illustrious for the rank his ancestors held in Africa than for himself.”2

This romantic tale strains credibility without absolutely defying it. Though it seems unlikely that a slave owner would be foolhardy enough to leave an African war chief more or less at liberty among a group of men who had quite recently been his soldiers, the history of the last days of colonial Saint Domingue is rich with examples of similarly self-destructive behavior. More recent research supports the idea that Toussaint's father was indeed the son of the junior Gaou-Guinou, who was shipped to Saint Domingue with his first wife, Affiba, and two children. The Arada prince was baptized with the name of Hyppo-lite and survived, though blind, until 1804. François Dominique Toussaint—Louverture-to-be—was the child of Hyppolite's second marriage to a woman named Pauline, which produced four daughters and three sons besides Toussaint: Jean, Paul, and Pierre, all of whom would later adopt the name of Louverture.

There is, however, one difficulty with this version of Toussaint's origins: he does not appear in the property lists of the comte de Noe, nor in those of Monsieur de Breda, the uncle from whom Noe inherited Breda Plantation in 1786 and who was the actual owner of the property during Toussaint's childhood and youth.

No written record of Toussaint's birth has ever been found either, and he contradicts himself (and others) concerning the date. His name suggests strongly that he was born on All Saints' Day, but does nothing to tell us the year. A letter he addressed to the French Directory in 1797 declares that he had “arrived at the age of 50 years when the French Revolution, which changed my destiny as it changed that of the whole world, had just begun.'3 This statement yields a birth date of 1739, yet according to Isaac Louverture, Toussaint was born in 1746, whereas a couple of other early biographers offer 1743, and in 1802 Toussaint himself, a prisoner in France, gave his age as fifty-eight, which supposes yet another birth date of 1745. In the absence of written records it is likely that he himself could only guess at the year of his birth, within this roughly seven-year spread, but it is clear enough that he was either in his late forties or early fifties when destiny changed everything for him.

He had lived much, much longer than the average slave in Saint Domingue—against expectation, for he was born a frail and sickly child and legend has it he was not expected to survive. Perhaps he owed his early nickname, Fatras-Baton (Throwaway-Stick), to this childhood frailty. But all slaves too old, unhealthy, or injured to work were marked Sisfatras (trash) on the lists of slaves on Breda Plantation. Toussaint had the care of his father (who actually outlived him) once he was old and blind, and the name Fatras-Baton might also have implied that he was in charge of all the infirm slaves at Breda.

According to Isaac's notes, Toussaint was educated by his godfather, Pierre Baptiste, who had a good knowledge of French, some knowledge of Latin, and “even some notions of geometry.”4 Baptiste, who by Isaac's